Finished doggie sweater

I finished sewing the Jimmie Johnson numbers on Dakota's dog sweater this afternoon. I ended up not having enough yarn to make the hood but I think it still turned out really well. It kind of looks a bit more like a jersey now don't you think?
The belly part including the mini-sleeves:

Our next scheduled visit to Mildmay is the 19th so we'll have to wait a bit to see how it fits and if she likes it. Here's a final pic to show just how knitting crazy I'm getting... three needles for the sleeves!

The last of the 3 day updates

So these pics are all from my solo trip to St. Thomas on Thursday. St. Thomas is pretty much due South of London by about 30 minutes. I thought I'd never been there before but turns out I've driven through it a few times on the way to various beaches on Lake Erie. I also thought it was pretty small but the population is actually 36,000 and there's a Ford plant and Wal-Mart and everything.

Shelly's Gifts. Where I found the bear getting ready to maul a fish:

There were a lot of murals of trains and things in the town. I think they were the first place to have passenger trolly trains in the town or something.
There was this really nice church right across from a string of Money Marts and pawn shops.
The store where I was able to find the flying discs. A little deceiving from the outside? I think so. They do things a little different in St. Thomas.



The Little Red Mitten. Home to oodles of yarn and things.

These pics are to document something I've never seen before: rolling yarn into a ball. When I bought the yarn in came in these big loops instead of a standard ball. Thankfully they showed (and then just did for me) how to make balls with this nifty contraption. I'm sure this saved me a lot of time and frustration. woot!


Don't worry, I asked if I could take her picture!

The last pic I have of my trip is a life size replica of Jumbo the elephant. Jumbo was killed by a passenger train there in 1885 so they decided to erect a $50,000 statue in his honour.

Hope you enjoyed this little tour of my stops in St. Thomas. It wasn't the nicest of places (lots of empty shops and not so great looking people on the streets) but did have a fair amount of charm and is probably a lot nicer in the summer.

The Little Red Mitten

While in St. Thomas I went to a specialty yarn store called The Little Red Mitten. I didn't exactly find the staff the most helpful but I did end up spending about three times what my budget was for the trip. The purchases should last me a few months though, so maybe it's not so bad...

My main purchase was this Manos silk blend yarn. It's a light green colour and is really soft and just all around quite wonderful. It's even from Uraguay and the proceeds help support impoverished women there.I'm hoping to make the following cardigan with this yarn:


I really like the detailing at the bottom and I think it will be a good spring-weather sweater. At this point I need to start thinking about clothing that won't be too warm that I can wear during the spring and summer so hopefully this cardigan will do the trick. I'm not really sure about how tricky the button holes and things will be, but here's for hoping.

I'm still working on the dog sweater for Dakota but should have that finished in the next couple of days if all goes well.

Aside from picking up some more needles, I also picked up this pattern. This will be the next project after the cardigan I think:So there you go! An update on the knitting projects. I suppose I should post an in-progress picture of the doggie jacket but maybe I'll leave that til later... So many pictures lately!

Banana muffins

This morning I made these banana muffins using this buttermilk subsitute. It was nummies!

Unfortunately it hasn't been that great of a morning. I got some marks back and got a 57 on the midterm I thought I failed (so close!), a 65 in participation for the same class (guess I should stop being on Facebook and doing crossword puzzles during this incredibly boring class), but pulled off an 88 for the course I didn't even read all the material for. Ah well, what can you do... Only 5 more weeks to go.

In other news, I went to apply for some positions with Health Canada in London only to discover that the applications closed yesterday and I've been denied the Passport job because of a lack of experience. At least they have my resume I guess. Hopefully something else will come up. I do have a meeting with Sun Life this coming week and am hoping for the best for that.

Today I'm hoping to get some papers done so I don't have to worry about them later on this month. Wish me well!

Gifts!

After my adventure in St. Thomas, I was so excited to give Lenny the purchased part of his birthday gift that I couldn't wait a whole month to give it to him!

The first hurdle was finding a gift bag that wasn't Christmas-y or girly. This Baby Gap bag was the closest due to its brown colour:I grabbed some of my scrapbook odds and ends and made this:

Into the bag went this statue of a smirking bear getting ready to maul a fish. It's an extension of the story of when Charlie and Jake are looking for a birthday gift for his mother on Two and A Half Men: Len always calls me his bear because I hibearnate longer in the morning than he does, I build myself little dens with blankets by the fire sometimes at night, and sometimes I express my desire to want to maul something to death. Ha!

Here's me immitating the bear smirk to my best abilities:So what was in the gift bag and worthy of a 30-minute trip you ask? Disc golf frisbees! These are really hard to find and I'm pretty sure nowhere sells them in London. They're over $20 a piece and not that light so it really doesn't lend well to purchasing over the Internet. Anyhoo here's the happy "birthday" boy with his gifts:

No we're really hoping for warmer weather to go out and use them. Today we had 15 cm of snow so maybe it's a bit further along than I anticipated. There is even snow on my nice spring wreath :(

It's not a tumour!

I've taken some pictures over the last few days of some of our cooking adventures.This one is from Friday night. We made some pizza together to use up a green pepper we had that was about to go. The funny bit was that Len didn't get all of the air bubbles out so there was this giant bubble that kinda looked like a tumour.
These next few pics were for further explaining how we do the broiled sweet potatoes.

1. Peel the sweet potato (or two)
   
2. Chop it into bite-sized pieces
3. Toss with a few tablespoons of EVOO, cumin, sea salt, and rosemary
4. Place on a foil-lined cookie sheet and broil until the edges are blackened (should take no more than 10 min)

They caramelize quite nicely with the broiling and thanks to the tin foil are fairly easy to clean. Here's the final product (we did nachos as well so that's what's on the right).

1. 

Well there you go mumsies, proof that we're cooking and feeding ourselves with real food. Nummy nummies!

The Joy of Migraines

Sorry I haven't posted much in the last few days. Ever since Thursday morning I've been feeling really under the weather head-achey wise. I thought it was maybe just from working out too much this week, however, after a 4-hour nap this afternoon perhaps it was being overtired. On the plus side, there will be a lot of posts coming up over the next few days as I play catch up with the 38 photos I've taken.

Tonight we went to Braise for dinner to celebrate our two-year anniversary (Mar. 3) and our Valentine's Day. I had the dry aged ribeye with creamy bone marrow (yuck), parsnip puree (yum!), smoked baby beets (surprisingly yummy), forest mushrooms (pretty tasty), with sauce bordelaise (pretty nummies too). Lenny had the pan roasted striped bass with braised oxtail (turns out this is actual ox's tail, not a fish like Lenny told me so I'd taste it :$) , toasted quinoa, forest mushrooms, mustard greens & seeds (actually yellow in colour; who knew?), and a cabernet vinaigrette au jus. We shared a chocolate mille follie for dessert which was on the house thanks to a coupon from the Food and Wine Show.

After dinner we came home with a latte (me) and coffee (Lenny) to play some more Boatload puzzles but not without first highlighting some of our favourite times over the past two years. I won't remember all of them, but I'll record some for future reference:

• Our trip to a nearly deserted Wonderland in the rain
• A beautiful river cruise of the 1000 islands
• The fantastic wine and food for my birthday at the Niagara wineries
• A 3 course food and wine pairing meal for Lenny's birthday at The Only On King. Some of the best food we've ever had.
• Watching Lenny slowly warm up to having Dakota around to the point where he'd get her SO excited to go to the dog park and then he'd run and chase her around there.
• Having Lenny and his mom support me at the big concert I helped organize in Toronto in March of 2009
• Being introduced to Baci chocolates and gelato. Also Lindt gelato for that matter at a wonderful pizza dinner with his mom and Mark.
• Running a few races together or just being at the finish line. There's a great amount of pride that comes with seeing your special someone lay it all out on the line and running 25-km race with a cold.
• Making pizzas with his little brother.
• Shoveling a cumulative 5-feet of snow during Snowmageddon.
• Going for post-dinner walks on a hot summer night.
  
• Watching Lenny slowly coming around to enjoying HomeSense. All I had to do was introduce him to the kitchen section and he was sold, but shh, don't tell.
• Seeing various movies together. They've pretty much all been either a comedy or romantic comedy so I have good memories of these.
  
• Road trips up to the relaxing Mildmay
• Watching Lenny help my dad hang drywall. Remembering this always makes me chuckle and brings a smile to my face.
• Surprise visits at my place of work. Lenny's always been pretty good with the surprise visits that make me so happy for the rest of my shift.

I'm sure I'll think of more, but I think that's a good bunch for now. See ya tomorrow!