A collection of wondrous things
While not entirely without its stresses, this week has mostly been made of awesome, so far. Here are some of the specifics:
- Finally got to the Kensington Market Festival of Lights this year, and it was amazing. A really eclectic variety of people from families with kids to punks with pitbulls, and all sorts of creative and entertaining things including mummers, giant animal puppets, Native singers, kids putting on mini-plays, fire-spinning circus folks, a masked raccoon gang, random public art... And I'm still probably missing half of what was there. There were a couple of points where I found myself getting tears in my eyes just because it was so amazing having all these different kinds of people together doing wildly creative things. And it really made me realize just how much, and why, I love this city.
- Tonight, I actually baked cookies, for the first time in quite a while. I am kind of baking-challenged as a general rule. Cooking, I am fine with, and consider myself pretty good at. Baking is a whole other story, and tends to be largely unexplored territory for me, with the exception of a few simple things like apple crisps. I have done a little more of it than usual since moving to my current apartment (which seems to have inspired some degree of domesticity in me), but still not much.
However, these cookies were really easy to make, and seem to have turned out very well, judging from the few - er, to be honest, more than a few - samples I tried. Yes, I'm trying to save them for tomorrow, but you know, I had to make sure they were all right. And the first one could have been a fluke, so I had to try a second, and a third, and so on until I was reasonably sure I'd eaten a sufficient sample size to provide statistically significant results. Blame that quantitative research methods course I took in grad school.
Anyway, I will definitely be making these again, because they are awesome: Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles. Dark chocolate spicy crunchy goodness. Also, they are vegan, which I know will be a plus to many people on my friends list.
I was also intending to make some vegan-ized Cinnamon Pecan Shortbread (I can substitute Earth Balance for the butter, right?), but the first recipe already made a whole lot of cookies, plus I am making a veggie shepherd's-pie-ish thing for tomorrow as well (did some of the preparations tonight, but I am tired and must sleep), so I think I should probably not get too crazily over-ambitious.
- Aidan continually manages to surprise and impress everyone he meets with his verbal skills. For that matter, sometimes he surprises me. I've been trying to help him learn to read lately, since he seems to be very interested in that, and a couple of times now when I've pointed to a word and asked him what it says, he's gotten it right. Including earlier this evening, when I showed him the word "train" and suggested we try and sound it out, starting by asking him what the first letter was - and he pre-empted the whole letter-by-letter thing by saying "Train!" I don't know if he actually read it, or just got it from context, but I have a feeling he's going to be reading really, really young, like I did.
Earlier this week, we had the following entertaining exchange with a musician at Ellington's while playing pool in the basement (for a very loose definition of playing pool, in that Aidan was running around on top of the pool table kicking the balls down the holes):
Musician: How old is he again? Two and a half, seriously? He talks like a four-year-old...
Me: Yeah, everyone's always surprised by how well he talks.
Musician: When I was a kid I was really hyper-verbal. When I was like three or so, I knew all about different kinds of dinosaurs and what a paleontologist was...
Me (on whim): Aidan, can you say 'paleontologist'?
Aidan: Paleontologist!
Musician: JESUS CHRIST!
Me (feeling guilty): Er... it's OK, I don't think he actually knows what it means. He's just good at repeating stuff that he hears.
Musician (to Aidan): OK, a paleontologist is like a... dinosaur teacher. But just the kind that teaches people about dinosaurs. Not, you know, teaching dinosaurs. Because that would be weird.
He does still get a few words amusingly wrong, though. At my dad's today, he carried the little wooden toy airplane I gave him around to show to everyone there, and solemnly told each of them that the spinny thing on the end was the "repeller".
Even funnier was when I asked him if he wanted me to make him some herbal tea, and he cheerfully replied "Yes, I would like some horrible tea." I did explain to him the difference between the words "herbal" and "horrible"... once I was able to stop laughing long enough to talk again.
- After reading a glowing review in the Toronto Star of Brooklyn Brewery's Black Chocolate Stout, a limited-edition seasonal beer the LCBO will only have for a short while, I was determined to get some, even if it meant braving the pre-Christmas hordes at multiple LCBO stores until I found one that had it. And oh my Gods, it was so worth it. Sweet, rich, smoky, delicious, and doesn't taste at all like it has 10% alcohol in it - you only find that out when after finishing one you are considerably tipsier than you expected to be. So, so good. Bringing some of that tomorrow as well.