ravnsdaughter

These days, I am walking around all bouncy and giddy. Life is GOOD. I have come to the conclusion that I have pretty much found my dream job. Work is going great, and I love it here.

I had a great mail day on Friday... my first Villainess order arrived! This is what I'd ordered myself to celebrate my new job. So far it's been awesome stuff, but I'll be doing a more detailed review at some point in the future. Here's a pic of what I ordered. There is also a bunch more photos from my weekend over on my Flickr page (and feel free to add me as a friend over there!)

I had a very busy but also very wonderful weekend. On Sunday, Ian came over in the late afternoon with a big hunk of meat (minds out of the gutter, people! it was a top sirloin roast) which he proceeded to coat with a rub made from brown sugar, coffee, cinnamon, cardamom, and a couple other spices, I think. Once that was in the oven, we relaxed with a glass of wine for a while before putting together the rest of dinner. The rest of dinner consisted of crab, chevre, dill and red pepper-stuffed phyllo triangles, stuffed mushrooms (made with the stems chopped finely and sauteed with onions and toasted pecans and then sprinkled with parmesan cheese before baking), and a risotto made with chicken stock, peas and parmesan. It was absolutely lovely.

That afternoon, I had put on a loaf of foccaccia bread with roasted garlic and parmesan in it, and also made a batch of chocolate chip banana muffins. The foccaccia recipe calls for instant yeast, but I was out, and figured I could just use regular yeast if I pre-proofed it and let it rise longer. I just didn't expect it to take 5 hours to rise enough to bake! Sheesh! It wasn't until after we had completely finished dinner and cleaned up afterwards that the bread was ready to go in the oven. So I put it in, turned the timer on, and then we headed for the bedroom... and I completely forgot about it until probably at least 2 hours later. All of a sudden I looked up, went "oh shit the bread!" and of course by then it was hard as a rock. Oh well, lesson learned... keep more instant yeast in the house! ;)

On Sunday, I packed up some projects and headed over to songstress1973's house. Turned out that instead of it just being her, gates_apco and I, she had also invited over morag_gunn, who is someone I knew of and recognized by sight (and I know her SO), but I hadn't actually met before. She's a lovely woman and very interesting and I'm glad I got a chance to get to know her... hopefully I'll see her at some SCA events in the future. She also brought over her absolutely ADORABLE dog, Finnegan. Finnegan is half shih tzu, half miniature pinscher, and is the second cutest dog in the world (the first being the dog belonging to my landlords). And he's SO well behaved.

We sat and stitched and watched the movie "Australia" which was really good, and had munchies and then songstress1973 cooked us dinner which was really yummy. The fig balsamic vinegar she got down at Granville Island the weekend before was TO DIE FOR. At some point mid-afternoon, it started snowing again... great huge fluffy flakes that immediately started accumulating on cars and the grass, which is absolutely crazy weather for her at this time of year. It continued long enough that morag_gunn got worried and headed home early, which was too bad, as I was really enjoying chatting with her.

I didn't end up going home until just after 10pm, so it was quite a long day.

This week, I am anticipating some more good mail days (I have a couple things ordered that should hopefully be arriving soon), but otherwise not too busy of a week... and then another fun day with Ian next Saturday.

Alrighty, time for a weekend update!

One of the things I was most looking forward to about working again was having the funds to get out and be social. As I worked on dealing with my depression over the past few months, I've become increasingly tired of being a hermit and staying home all the time. Add to that the fact that I've been seeing someone very casually over the past 2 months, and both he and I have a love of trying new and exotic restaurants and things like that, but doing that sort of thing is difficult on the budget of an unemployed bum.

So this last weekend, being the first weekend after starting my new job (and having my first paycheque in hand, to boot), I decided it would be fun to head down to Granville Island and wander around. Ian was all for this idea, considering that the Public Market contains several very interesting shops of interest to foodies. I was more interested in the various craft supply shops, as well as the hat store and Dragonspace. I actually ended up spending not a whole lot of money - all I picked up was 2 small vials of beads for the lace shawl I'm knitting, and 2 macarons from the boulangerie. We had a late lunch at the Granville Island Taproom, which does a very neat Tasters Round of beers - 6oz glasses of 4 different kinds of their own microbrewery beers. I'm not a beer drinker (yet), but Ian is, though I had sips of his to try them. I was VERY impressed with their chicken strips, which were quite obviously made in-house.

Our original plan had been to pick up groceries to cook dinner together at my place, but I had gone to the doctor in the morning on Saturday (which I will refrain from talking about because it would definitely be TMI), and ran into a good friend and her husband there, who told me that it was another mutual friend of ours' birthday and there would be a dinner for her that evening at a local greek restaurant. (By the way, I highly recommend Yianni's in New Westminster.) So when I met up with Ian at the train station, I asked if he'd be up for meeting some of my friends, as I'd really like to go to the dinner, and he was fine with that so we did that instead. It was a lovely time, and I got to meet some new people and catch up with some good friends, including my laurel, who was rather happy to see me out and about. After dinner, the party got moved to the birthday girl's house, but Ian and I headed back to my place instead.

Sunday was very quiet, but I did manage to get a fair amount accomplished, though not all of my laundry as I'd hoped, because my annoying roommate insisted on budging in to wash his new pants and then my landlord wanted the machines.

Today I'm working 8-2, which means my shift is already half over! Getting off of work at 2pm is going to be amazing. After work, I'll be heading up to the market, then I need to head home and finish up my laundry and mop the floors. Then I'm going to pull out my torch and start working on some beads again, to go with the norse outfit I'm going to be working on soon. Lots of fun!