Yarnbombing Day

My yarnbombing in Barming has survived for almost 24 hours now.

Here is a story I wrote: Graffitti knitters to hit streets on Yarnbombing Day


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Chipmonks get creative

  
This origami budgie was made by @maxxmonkey's chipmonks. It is a copy of the budgie I found in the garden a few years ago. It is very well done and I wanted to share it with my faithful readers :)

Bird's eye views

I know I am breaking a cardinal rule of photography here by taking a picture with a window in the background, but so be it. Squint. A friend gave me the mint plant on the windowsill. It is in a pot given to me by a cousin. I bought the white orchid on Great Suffolk Street and the violet one in Borough Market. The plate I bought in Hollywood. The lamp I bought on The Cut. The beer tankard is a leaving gift from my colleagues in Toronto.


Here is a longer view of it all.


Kitchen table with picture taken from train of mountains and lake in Alberta.


A shot of the shelving unit I built. The vase is from Mum's friend Marie. She bought it for me when I went to visit her in Grayshott.

Getting organized

For those of you who've been wondering, I've been getting my flat in London organized. Yes, I am still coping with many British "terms & conditions", but I have made lots of progress. The major remaining hurdle is to deal with the taxes.

Here are some pictures of things in my flat.

The picture above shows some of the toys I have knit.

Christmas pompom

This is the pompom I made at a craft party in Islington.

Injection to pen collection

I bought a new pen this week. It's chrome with black swirls and contains blue ink.


I bought it in a shop called The Ultimate Gift Shop at Queen and Yonge Streets.


I've been collecting souvenir floaty pens for a long time. They are all fine point pens with blue ink.


The trick with floaty pens is to buy only the ones made in Denmark. If they are made anywhere else toss them directly into the trash because the quality is substandard.

There are two basic models of floaty pens made in Denmark. The ones with the solid, flat chrome pen clip have "Made in Denmark" etched into them lengthwise. The ones with the clip made of thick wire have "Made in Denmark" imprinted in circular relief with very tiny letters on the end of the pen. Beware of imitators!


Sometimes people give me floaty pens, but most I have collected myself from trips I have made.

A windfall week

I went for dinner this evening with a friend who works for Cadbury. She brought me a bag full of candy. It should last a few years--unless I decide to share it.


This is the old elastic band ball started in about 1990 by my father. It is now almost a foot in diameter.


And I was lucky enough to go for a couple of cold ones at P.J. O'Brien's the day after St. Patrick's Day. I'm not Irish, but it is a good pub. The white spots in the photo are rain. Unfortunately, we didn't get more snow--I was hoping we'd break our snow accumulation record.

In like a lion

After the massive snowstorm we had last weekend, Toronto is now about 17 centimetres short of its annual snowfall record. When the record was set in the winter of 1938-39, it snowed 207.4 centimetres.

A week later, it's already cycling weather, although the streets are dangerously narrow because of the monstrous snowbanks.


Last Saturday, a friend and I braved the elements and took the Dufferin bus down to the Liberty Grand building in the Canadian National Exhibition grounds to see the Artist Project.


There was a wide variety of work in the four-day exhibition and sale. The show was mostly comprised of paintings, but there were also a few sculptures.


A lot of the rural scenic art works are apparently painted by artists who drive around taking photographs in the countryside and paint from snaps of images of the highway and surrounding fields.


The only thing I bought were these two dolls made by DD. They were on sale in the Sketch area. Sketch is a community not-for-profit organization that helps street-involved and homeless youth get involved in the arts. DD wasn't there, but the people I bought the dolls from were thrilled that I bought both of them. They were glad the two weren't going to be separated.


The 10-minute walk back to the bus stop was brutal ... I accumulated about four inches of snow.

Buckwheat's new blanket

This is Mish's cat Buckwheat.

Mish and Buckwheat live together in Montreal.

Mish recently sent me a couple of seasons of the TV series "Battlestar Galactica" because I'd never seen it, so I knit Buckwheat a blanket with some Peruvian cotton yarn that I had received as a gift.

According to Mish, Buckwheat is enjoying the blanket.

I met Mish long ago when I lived in Ottawa, but I've never met Buckwheat.

Buckwheat has his own cat door and comes and goes as he likes.

His fur got matted this winter, so Mich had to take him to get it trimmed.

It doesn't look too bad in the picture at the top of the page, but you can tell he isn't too fluffy.

This cat curled up in the picture below is another cat lucky enough to have his own door.

His name is Cooper. I don't know Cooper's owners, but he lives on Bloor Street in Toronto.

A friend--Roxanne--pointed out the sign on the gate about Cooper one day.


I don't have any pets . . . only a couple of plants.


This is one of them. It's no longer decorated for Christmas--it's just a regular miniature evergreen.

I can't remember what kind.

Lulu's new blanket

I knitted a blanket for my friend's dog Lulu with some cotton yarn I received as a gift.
The yarn is from Americo on Queen Street. I've never knitted anything on such big needles before.

Lulu seemed quite pleased . . .

Scoring a Gibson's Touchdown

It's Grey Cup weekend and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are facing off against the Saskatchewan Rough Riders.

My friend's son Simon Ho, who tends bar at Toronto's trendy Drake Hotel, entered a drinks competition sponsored by Gibson's whisky. He invented a drink called the Gibson's Touchdown. It won and is now billed as the official drink of the Grey Cup by Gibson's. Here's the recipe:

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice and combine:

- 1 1/2 oz. rye whisky

- 1/2 oz. orange juice

- 1/4 oz. maple syrup

- 1 oz. cranberry juice

- Dash of bitters

- Shake and serve in a rocks glass filled with ice

- Serve with pretzels or other salty snacks



I served the drink last night to friends. We discovered that the dash of bitters is an essential ingredient--otherwise the drinks turn out a bit too sweet. I used Averno bitters and served the drinks stirred rather than shaken with a slice of orange as a garnish.

We drank the tasty cocktails before dinner with cheese, crackers, spicy Thai-flavoured chips and corn chips.

One consumer of the drink was so taken with it that he wrote with the following remarks:

"Thaza darngolly good kinda drink, graycop er not. Tried er out shevral times B4 dinnar an gollyjeez that crunbry an maplesyrup an oranj shur nokkkt me fera looperoony, eh? Wifey wuz sayin givsome, givsom, tuchdone, tuchdon. Bud I sez Too late, eh? I drunk itall. We ar rye outta ran, eh, er rAnoutta rye."