Alphabet Food Challenge

Two weekends ago, Emily and I had the BRILLIANT idea to have an alphabet day. This meant only eating 26 types of food all day, each from a letter of the alphabet. I’ll take you through the day.

PRE-BREAKFAST

Tea

BREAKFAST

Ricies

Milk

Kiwifruit

Yogurt

LUNCH

Loaf

Capsicum

Honey Mustard

Spinach

Bacon

Vanilla Coke

AFTERNOON TEA

Gingernut

Devonshire Cream

Jam

SNACK

Apple

Xocolatl

DINNER

Quiche made with

Pastry

Zucchini

Egg

Onion

Feta

With a side of

Noodles with

Unsalted Butter

And

Water

DESSERT

Ice Cream

So yeah we got creative in some places (re: loaf and xocolatl [the Aztc word for chocolate]), but hey.

This Is Terraformed Mars

Pretty cool, eh?

Retriever

In grade 1, a few of us “advanced” spellers got to create our own list of words for our spelling quiz. Having a golden (ok, this post is just full of irony since I just spelled that “goldon”) retriever at home, I suggested that one of our words be “retriever.” When the time for the test came, I, for some reason, decided to write the word “retriever” on a slip of paper and put it on my lap. I can’t remember if I actually used the paper to spell the word correctly on the quiz, but I do remember getting it right.

Afterwards, I went up to my teacher with a HUGE grin, a proud sort of smile, to share with her my ingenious strategy to ensure that I would spell the word right. Clearly, she was not as pleased with me as I was, evident by the concerned look on her face. She looked at me and said:

“I didn’t think that you would cheat. I didn’t think that would be something that Devon would do.”

Seriously, those were her exact words. She remains to this day one of my favourite teachers. And I don’t know why in the world I thought it would be ok for me to cheat on a quiz, but for some reason I did. I don’t know if I had ever been given the opportunity to full-out cheat on something before… I’m sure I had tricked my family with stories once in a while (or at least I thought I was tricking them), but never actually cheated.

Anyway. The point of this isn’t “and I never cheated again,” but rather a realization that the way we act dictates people’s perception of us… everything we do makes an impression on our character and when that impression is wrong, disappointment follows. Or something like that.

This isn’t some reflection on my current state of mind, I’m just wondering why this is one of the small handful of memories of grade 1 that I remember. I’m not one for analyzing dreams, but as for the memories we keep… there must be a reason for those, right?

Yogurt for Dinner

We woke up this Sunday morning to find that Wellington decided to carry through with the weekend trend of "rain." So we decided to pop in one of the two Meryl movies we brought with us to New Zealand... Julie & Julia. Now, we quote this movie a lot. One in particular stood out for us today, though: "yogurt for dinner."

This happens after Julie Powell gets into an argument with her husband and - brace yourselves - loses the will to continue cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. If you haven't seen the movie, don't worry, that wasn't a spoiler. It's just one of the many moments of the "Amy Adams part" of the movie that you will come to love/hate.

When Emily and I are discussing what to have for dinner or what to buy at the grocery store for upcoming meals and find ourselves in a sort of culinary mind fart, we resort to: "yogurt for dinner." During our early days in Wellington (because, well, we're old townies now) we decided that we would definitely actually have yogurt for dinner someday and whaddya know today was the day.

We had a yogurt parfait. Which is essentially yogurt + granola. Now, it would have been great to have some of Mom's homemade yogurt (side note: after eating homemade yogurt ["curds"] in India for lunch everyday, I got a craving for my mom's version of it when I got home but I forgot to ask if we could make some... mental note to remind self for when I get home in July), but we did have some homemade granola! Emily worked her magic in the kitchen (but seriously, my sister is a really good

cuisinier and I would be having yogurt for dinner every night without her) and made some homemade granola! I would ask her what is in the recipe but she is intensely concentrated on a game of solitaire right now and I dare not distract her.

Speaking of dinners, on Thursday night we had sushi. Em picked up some salmon rolls and crab rolls from a place not too far from here.

Friday morning, I woke up and my lips were SO dry. I spent the day drinking lots of water.

Saturday morning, I woke up and around my lips were SO, SO dry and my face had a bit of a rash.

Sunday morning, I woke up and my lips were better but my eye had swollen about 25% of the way closed.

We can only think of one thing that may have caused this outbreak of [what we think are] hives: the crab meat in the sushi. I can no longer put a cocky "N/A" through the "Allergies?" section on medical forms anymore. I am allergic to crab meat. True, it doesn't make me die or anything but it makes me feel like Joan Rivers after a fresh dozen injections of botox. And if it was just something random, I still don't think I will be eating crab meat just in case because when I don't feel normal I turn into a big baby. Like in that genius NyQuil commercial... "Pam... Pam... can you call my mom?"

Anyway, hopefully my face simmers down to normal for what looks like is going to be a rainy, wet week. I will stay dry, insha'Allah (as my boss from last summer would say).

Orange

In both elementary and secondary school, my peers and I were always encouraged to discover what type of “learner” each of us was. In grade ten, I remember having to do a "true colours" quiz to define exactly what we were. We were either gold, blue, orange, or green.

Anyway, as we finished our quizzes we had to go to each of the four corners of the room, each for a different colour. I saw the orange corner piling up with people... people who did a lot of sports (not that I didn’t “do” a lot of sports, meaning that I liked to run in soccer but was hopeless with the ball), people who were generally in tech courses, and the kids who couldn’t stay focused on anything. I found the quiz online and charts explaining "how we see ourselves" and "how others see us." I've put them below and highlighted the qualities that apply to me.

Gold Personality:

Things that frustrate golds:	Things golds do to frustrate others:
·        Irresponsibility	·        Control freak
·        Lack of planning	·        Being bossy and controlling
·        Lack of discipline	·        Working long hours
·        Laziness	·        Being obsessive
·        High risk taking	·        Being judgmental
·        Illegal behavior	·        Planning for everything

 

Blue Personality:

Things that frustrate blues:	Things blues do to frustrate others:
·        Lying	·        Lack of planning
·        Violence	·        Being passive
·        Personal rejection	·        Avoiding conflict
·        Lack of communication	·        Suppressing problems
·        Lack of close friends	·        Being too generous
·        Sarcasm	·        Being overly sentimental

 

Orange Personality:

Things that frustrate oranges:	Things oranges do to frustrate others:
·        Rules and laws	·        Ignoring rules
·        Same routine	·        Being undisciplined
·        Deadlines	·        Lack of planning
·        Paperwork	·        Being quick-tempered
·        Lack of adventure	·        Thinking out loud
·        Too much structure	·        Impulse buying

 

Green Personality:

Things that frustrate greens:	Things greens do to frustrate others:
·        Routine	·        Not being sociable
·        Small-talk	·        Living in the future
·        Plagiarism	·        Being wordy
·        Illogical arguments	·        Blowing up when criticized
·        Social functions	·        Not going with the flow
·        Incompetence	·        Being too independent

Clearly I am not a "blue." But when I was doing this test, I distinctly remember emphasizing, in my mind, my gold and green qualities. I just know that I skewed my results so that I wasn't an orange. But, now that I am exactly halfway through my job, I realize that I am feeling more orange than I ever have before. I sincerely kick my grade ten self for excluding myself from the orange group when really, I'm as orange as I am gold as I am green.

Actually, I think it was stupid that we growing human beings had to assign ourselves to just one colour and one corner of the room when really we should have been embracing all of our colours... but perhaps the curriculum has changed since then. And I'm not saying that this colour test has defined who I am, but it kind of has. I've been thinking that I'm this gold, going through life in my merry gold way without really embracing my orangeness and greenness (and a little bit of blueness).

What am I even trying to say? Screw these personality tests? Maybe. I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that me in this present work environment has really made me realize my gold/green frustrations and has emphasized the opposite in my orange and that I need to stop ignoring my orange and instead embrace it... and for these last six weeks, find out how I can incorporate my orangeness into my everyday routine (which apparently is anti-orange anyway) because right now, I'm feeling a little blue (because blue is the opposite of orange in that it is complementary, right?).

I don't know if any of this makes sense to anyone, let alone me. But I think I am having an allergic reaction to some sushi I ate so that might have something to do with it.

Seals and Dead Stoats

Last Friday we took a short trip south of Wellington to a suburb called Island Bay. Here are some photos from the journey.

At the beginning of the walk.

I like the horizontality of this one.

"Red"

So many seals sunbathing.

For the LOTR readers out there, this is where right outside the Black Gate was filmed... when Sam slipped down the slope and Frodo had to cover him with his rock cloak thing. At least we're pretty sure this is where that was filmed.

Big big big big water.

OOH candid

Take a hop off these rocks and keep on swimming until you're in Antarctica!

Happy Devon

If I make this picture any bigger it kind of goes off the page, but click on it if you want to get the full effect.

This is a dead stoat that I almost stepped on. Part of the joke is that some of the policy work I do is on pest management in New Zealand. Stoats are pests here, and this one seems to have died (probably from poison). So +1 Devon! I must be doing something right.

A Really Fabulous Seal

Ok so all of these seal posts makes it kind of clear that we saw seals this weekend. Tomorrow the full story will be revealed...

By the way, what you are seeing above is my first GIF! Made from two pictures that my sister took.

A Seal in Wellington

A Sheep in Auckland

Sticky Buddy

Whoever sat at this desk before me definitely had a cat or something because there are white hairs everywhere.

Somebody needs a Sticky Buddy.

Things Aren't Going Wrong

I’ve been feeling comfortable at my work in New Zealand… too comfortable. It’s calm. And it feels a little off to me. Don’t get me wrong, things going smoothly and as-planned is a good thing! I’m just not used to the lack of chaos and activeness in what I do, so perhaps that’s why I feel a little sedated.

My boss and I meet every week for a formal check-up and review of the work I have done during the past several days. He acknowledged that, yeah, a lot of the work done by the office is done in front of a computer and that it can sometimes seem a little unvaried. He is very correct in this.

In my job last summer and in my academics, which is either very on-your-feet or very let’s-talk-about-it, there is little time to let the mind settle into a state of what I like to call mental cruise control. And it is interesting to compare the work I do with the Society to other parts of my life. But before I go all “I NEED TO BE ACTIVE”, I have to ask myself: is this “mental cruise control” appropriate for the task at hand? And I think the answer is yes. As my boss said, the very nature of the work is sit-down-and-concentrate.

Figuring out what stimulates my mind as I reach the end of week 5/12, what method of driving (so to speak) best suits my personality, is something positive that I will definitely take away from this experience. It’s also bettering my ability to cruise control because let’s face it, I like to talk. I can be quiet (though my sister would beg to differ), but most of the time I find that learning and work gets done by speaking. As for my work here… there might be some days where I speak only 10 words during work hours, and they’re almost all pleasantries. But hey, it gets work done.

Really, things aren’t going wrong. There aren’t things for me to fix and there aren’t moments where I am forced to problem-solve, which I would say I’m already good at. Instead, there are things for me to find. And “fix” and “find” aren’t even on the same spectrum; I can’t see a way to compare the two words. So this is definitely something new… something different… and I’m simply trying to figure out how finding can help me fix things in my future endeavours.

So that’s sort of what is going on in the back of my mind as I read about New Zealand researchers conducting Antarctic ice sheet studies and making volcanic activity hypotheses. Because while I can see what I am doing immediately and the effects it has now (words being written in a document), I also need to stay focussed on what all of this is doing for me in the future.

Mushrooms!

Ok, I’m picking up with my blogging this week. Here in New Zealand, the Queen’s Birthday is celebrated on the first Monday in June, so long weekend for us! I’ll get to what we did over the long weekend later this week though. First I want to go back a couple weekends to when my sister and I climbed Mount Victoria in Wellington. It is part of the city’s greenbelt. It is also where the Hobbit’s Hideaway in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was filmed. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the bit right after Frodo and Sam run into Merry and Pippin after they’ve “been into Farmer Maggot’s crop!” Then they roll down that big ol’ hill and a carrot breaks and then Pippin sees mushrooms and then Frodo yells about getting off the road and then they almost get caught by the dark rider and then they go to the Buckleberry Ferry. Back up to the mushrooms. Whenever I see mushrooms in the wild now, I always quote Pippin.

I thought that this would be the MOST appropriate time to quote this line seeing as we were ON the path on which the scene was filmed and there were mushrooms there so of course I got onto the ground.

Here’s a view of where we think that big old log that the hobbits hide behind was. We think that we remember the special features DVD mentioning that the tree was a set piece, and this divot in the ground is the perfect place for it.

I’ll put one more picture of the path below as I sign off from another LOTR-based blog. After we finish up our LOTR adventures in July, I am going to write a blog post on this… phenomenon (?) as I see it.

Canadian Canoeing Down the Puhoi

The Maori, when first arriving upon the shores of New Zealand centuries ago, did so in large sea-faring canoes. Not the typical kind of canoe that we see on the lakes in Ontarian cottage country. This leads to the distinction between “canoe” and “Canadian canoe.” When Emily and I saw the opportunity to take a Canadian canoe down the Puhoi River (map below), we grabbed our paddles – as all Canadians travel with their canoe paddles – and took to the water.

I think a couple things attracted us to canoeing in New Zealand. One, we had the choice to either kayak or canoe and since adding kayaks to our cottage a few years ago, we haven’t canoed as much. Also, it we thought it would be fun to canoe somewhere completely unfamiliar with different terrain – we’re used to lakes and cliffs and forest, but here we got rivers and rolling hills and the occasional marsh. I think the little taste of home – and Canada in general – was also nice as we took our canoe paddles and felt the familiar push against the water.

After a half hour trek through Wenderholm Regional Park (about an hour away from Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city), we met the people from whom we were renting the canoe. We got into the canoe, they gave us our paddles, then asked:

                “So, have you ever been in a Canadian canoe before?”

                “Yeah, we’re Canadian.”

                “Oh. Well I won’t bother giving you the lesson.”

Then we were pushed off down the Puhoi River. Our canoe was bright yellow and plastic, much opposite from our quarter-century-old (right? Mom and Dad?) green, fibreglass-and-wood (right? Mom and Dad) canoe in which our parents paddled us around Ontario when we were little. I had no plastic toy ship to drag alongside the boat, no sandwich on homemade bread in a Tupperware container, and certainly no father at the stern taking his paddle and holding it over my neck letting cold water dribble down my back. So it was a different experience, but with Emily and her handy J-stroke steering the canoe and me with my ox-like work ethic (ha), we got along just fine.

For about the first ten minutes. Then, the navigator in the bow might have led the vessel into some shallow waters. He probably should have taken the bushes growing out of surface as a hint, but instead he optimistically said, “We’ll be fine.”

We were not. We didn’t sink or anything, but I did have to get out of the canoe and step onto the muddy riverbed. This mud was more like a sponge, though, and the texture on my feet made me cringe… and I was very vocal about my displeasure (in a fun sort of way) as I tried to correct my mistake by dragging the canoe into deeper waters. I was convinced that it was quicksand and I was going to die. I did not.

ANYWAY, the rest of the trip went fairly well. We had beautiful weather, a lot of food (they suggested taking a picnic for before or after the paddle, but we expertly ate during), and the incoming tide made the paddling pretty easy. A few hiccups along the way: I missed announcing some sticks in the river which we may or may not have hit, some ducks took off from within overhanging foliage and I legitimately screamed for all of New Zealand to hear, and my sister “accidentally” splashed me with water when I was acting like a GPS (in response to the aforementioned stick problem). We said hello to some passing kayakers, too.

                “Is this what they call a Canadian canoe?”
                “Yep! And we’re Canadian!”

                “OH! How APT!”

Clearly our human interaction is thrilling.

So yeah. A great day. Canoeing. In New Zealand. Who would have thought? Some pictures below for your enjoyment (we didn’t bring Emily’s DSLR just in case we tipped over… but with such expert canoeists, that was HARDLY a worry! [Sarcasm intended. It was most definitely a worry.] Instead we took my point-and-shoot [which we diligently wrapped in a grocery bag] and my waterproof GoPro. Ok, enough parentheses and brackets, enjoy the pictures.)

Just a couple Canadians in a canoe.