Mom 2.0

I get a lot from my mom - we both love to perform, befriend and wear hot pink. We both empathize with animals and personify objects. We don't understand dill pickles and licorice. We are capable of playing video games and watching movies until our eyelids droop and the sun begins to rise.

Turns out I kind of look like her too. After getting my new passport pic done, I added an Instagram filter which pretty much recreates my mom in the 70s:

I love it! This has got to be my favourite McBain Camera portrait so far.

Now it's time to be run-down and sick in bed. It's not even officially February yet!  But the sore throat and accompanying achy snotty lethargy don't lie - 10 hour work days, dancing 20 hours a week and lack of sleep are getting to me.

I need to do better with the sleeping.  Because everything else was sure hard to avoid!

Like

-17 workshops in 6 days with one of my favouritest dancers in the world
-performing Afro Cuban and getting a thumbs up from our hip, smart and progressive young new mayor
-trying acro yoga for the first time and balancing a 200lb big blond man on my legs
-working on cutting edge new stuff at the office (well in North America anyway) and learning non-stop

Aughh! I want ALL the things!  Good thing practice was cancelled tonight. I took it as a sign. Time to catch up on dreams and unconsciousness!

Unconsciousness will be prompted by generic Neo Citran, courtesy of the big blond I balanced on my legs :)

Bam, Bam and BAM!

Oh, you fabulous day, you. Got a great performance review at work and then today was the first evening of Alien's week-long workshops :) AND she gave me a compliment! 

Body exhausted yet mind still excited. What's a gal to do? (Answer to this question is usually reading or YouTube).

Anxiety and Teriyaki

One nice thing about being an engineer is having a good number of male coworkers who will willingly help push your car when it is stuck in the snow :)  Not that a woman couldn't do it but myself and the other females were in heels that night.

Poor parking decision on my part but I may have still been high on adrenalin at the time.  I was coming from my first performance ever which I only had two days to learn.  I don't think I've ever been that anxious before a performance - I actually felt nauseated the day before.  But it went fine and I was just so happy I made it through.  It helps to have amazing Cuban dancers on either side of you to take away the pressure.  Two elegant bookends make almost any book look extra good ;)

Speaking of books, I finished devouring MaddAddam and am currently rereading the rest of the Oryx and Crake trilogy.  I couldn't resist!  Margaret Atwood has such a knack not just for speculative fiction, but even for brand/product names and company names in the speculative future.  Maybe she should be copyrighting that stuff even though it doesn't really exist yet.

Oh double practice Sundays ... How you challenge my body so.  I really should get up and make my work lunches for the week.  I need to make sure food is accessible all week, since I will be rushing between work and dance even more than usual.  One of my favourite dancers is coming to do workshops for seven days.  It's none other than Alien Ramirez (the one I was thrilled to be mistaken for in Miami ... even if it was very very brief).   Okay my hunger is beating out my beaten body ... must go cook! I am on a stir fry kick right now.  I didn't realize there were so many ready-made sauces out there to make life easier.  

Asian Fail.

Happy New Year!  I just discovered the hard way that Korean soybean paste (doenjang) does NOT equal miso paste.  It is not even close.  My first lesson of 2014.

I was craving vegetables and rice and excitedly found a vegan recipe for fried rice in order to have my work lunches lined up for the week.  The recipe called for miso paste and so I went to TNT to pick some up.  TNT surprisingly didn't have it and I was in a rush so I ended up grabbing a tub of the nearest brown soybean paste, assuming all would be well.

When I started cooking, I noticed the paste had a pretty pungent smell but proceeded to succumb to the urge to add a tablespoon more than the recipe called for anyway.  I've never cooked with any type of soybean paste before and "soybean paste" just sounds so harmless.  Like a white sock or a pencil eraser.

This tendency to eyeball ingredients has resulted in almost ruining my big batch of vegan fried rice.

I tasted the result and it was WAY STRONGER than I expected.  A powerfully pungent punch to the taste buds.  A quick google revealed that doenjang is something like ten times more potent than miso!  Yikes.  I ended up going out for lunch today instead.

I am currently trying to dilute my overpowering fried rice with some plain old jasmine rice and more veggies before I go to dance practice.  It seems to be working.  Now my batch of fried rice will be even bigger, but at least it won't feel like a thousand soybeans died in my mouth every time I eat lunch at work.