We’ve also found this totally awesome whiskey reviewer named Ralfy, whose video reviews are an odd mix of inadvertent comedy and interesting facts. He’s reviewed pretty much every whiskey you can imagine… and the bit of context and professional opinion makes our drinking experience that much more enjoyable.

I don’t have an extremely important point to make or a funny story to go along with this… Except maybe to marvel at how many whiskey bottles we have gone through in a few short months, yikes!

Anyway, I totally recommend getting into it. I love sipping whiskey and reading a book. So cozy.

Of the whiskeys pictured, my two favourites are: Balvenie, which is sweet & tasty but unfortunately doesn’t have much of a finish, and Finlaggan, which is stronger and peatier and has a much longer finish.

Hoping it’ll be more of a useful collection of posts relating to wedding planning in an interesting, creative way, rather than anything unbearably romantic or girly. All I ever read about is how niche blogs are the way to go; this seems like a prime opportunity. Exploiting my wedding, here I come!

However, I’ve also stopped using a mouse at work and I no longer lift weights at the gym that require any wrist strength, so I think that’s been a contributing factor to my improvement as well.

Also, physiotherapist thinks it’s not tendonitis or carpal tunnel or any sort of repetitive motion strain. When inspecting me, she appeared absolutely horrified by the state of my back and neck. Not that I’ve ever thought anything OF my back or neck, or realized there’s anything particularly awful about them, but when I saw her face after looking me over, I guess they are awful. Anyway, she thinks the pain is due to crunched up nerves in my upper back and neck and it’s just travelling down and manifesting itself in my hands and arms. I don’t know if this is better or worse than tendonitis but I find the idea of it comforting nonetheless.

OK so that is the state of my health, totally not all that exciting.

I also got an invite to write on Medium which made my week. I pushed my arm pain aside & wrote a piece, which is actually a re-write of an old blog post: My mom, the Jehova’s Witness. Kind of. It’s not a literary masterpiece and I’m sad that I’m not as talented as Dustin Ballard (who is quickly becoming my favourite author on Medium), but after crying to Ben that I suck at everything and why I can’t I just be the BEST at something PLEASE, he told me that everyone feels that way, which I’m really hoping is true but seriously, I am surrounded by talent and no matter where my interest lies, it seems that everybody around me is better at it than me.

Finally – and no, this is not the highlight of this blog post or anything – Ben and I went to Vancouver for 3 days last week. It rained the whole time, Siri nearly lead us to our deaths on multiple occasions, and her haphazard instructions also sparked a 30 second argument followed by a 5 minute grumpy silence between us when we were suddenly on a highway heading the opposite direction of where we wanted to be. BUT we survived and we spent a lot of money and I remembered (again) how glad I am that I don’t live in Vancouver and how going there for a ‘little trip’ is really not as fun as you think it’s going to be.

So that is that, a whole lot of paragraphs about a whole lot of ‘nothin.

(Oh yeah, and I am extremely bummed about Google Reader, never mind what TechCrunch has to say about it)

I was worried about losing all those awesome recipe sources so I put together a RSS bundle of most of the top PunchFork blogs.

You can grab the bundle here if you’re interested!

Brought to you by my extremely pained wrists. No more typing today!

This is a major problem for me, since my life pretty much depends on my ability to type. In order to avoid aggravating it any more than I have to, I’ve sworn off personal computer usage for now Hopefully my arm will heal but even writing this little bit is causing pain to shoot up my fingers and into my wrist.

Updated Feb 28 – still having serious wrist pain. Super lame. Going to see a professional this Monday so hopefully that will help!

If you want a robust syntax highlighter, it looks like Pygments is the way to go, but you just want a simple javascript solution, Prism is totally rad.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t write enough code outside of work, so I recently contributed a little bit of my own to Prism – CoffeeScript highlighting, which has been included as an optional add-on on the Prism download page, as well as a new theme, which can be found on github.

A bit of back-story for those of you who aren’t totally up-to-speed on my love life: Ben and I started dating in November of 2007, when we were both 20 years old. Our first ‘date’ wasn’t even a date – Ben was trying to organize an after-work pub visit, and everyone bailed but me. We split a pitcher of beer and just… talked. And I think we were both surprised to find how much we had in common.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve come all the way from that night to here. We are both SUCH different people from the ones we were that cold drizzly evening.

So.

For my birthday, my mom did something awesome – she paid for a night’s stay at the Oak Bay Beach Hotel, which is an absolutely stunning ocean-front resort. Ben and I have stayed in some beautiful resort-style hotels in the past, but none of them even came close in comparison. It is so fabulous there.

Ben’s plans went off flawlessly. The hotel has a really nice lounge area overlooking the ocean, filled with plush seating and an enormous fireplace. We each got ourselves a glass of single malt scotch and sat by the window. Ben told me that my birthday gift was a card, which we had to read together.

The card was more like a book. It was hand-made, with little ribbons that I had to undo to read each page. Every page extolled my virtues, in a careful lead-up to the final page, and a question: Will you marry me?

At which point Ben got down on one knee and pulled out a ring.

There was no doubt. We’ve talked about our future a million times, and getting engaged was more of a question of when, not if.

There’s something crazy though about looking down and seeing a ring on my finger. And knowing that I have to start planning a wedding. A WEDDING. My wedding.

Anyway. That is the story. We went out with a bunch of friends and celebrated afterwards – they’d all been notified beforehand of the upcoming engagement. Everyone was SO awesome with their congratulations and excitement. The hotel staff also seemed totally excited on our behalf, saying that we were the first couple to get engaged since the hotel re-opened after its extensive renovations ($52 million worth!) The entire night was perfect. Although I am slightly hungover today.

I am sure there will be many wedding plan blog posts in the upcoming months. We’re thinking sometime in April or May of next year…Destination wedding perhaps?

So far I have already received a free biscotti from where I get coffee every day, so things are off to a very good start.

Also, I know that birthdays are really only exciting the the person HAVING the birthday and fairly banal to everyone else, so… Well, I know. Sorry in advance.

The name “bull” was applied because of the dog’s use in the sport of bull baiting. This entailed the setting of dogs (after placing wagers on each dog) onto a tethered bull. The dog that grabbed the bull by the nose and pinned it to the ground would be the victor. It was common for a bull to maim or kill several dogs at such an event, either by goring, tossing or trampling. Over the centuries dogs used for bull-baiting developed the stocky bodies and massive heads and jaws which typify the breed as well as a ferocious and savage temperament. Bull-baiting – along with bear-baiting – reached the peak of their popularity in England in the early 1800s until they were both made illegal by the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835. Therefore, the Old English Bulldog had outlived its usefulness in England as a sporting animal and its active or ‘working’ days were numbered.

I surf it now and then. Some of the articles are boring, others are great.

Here are a few of the great ones.

• Barrel of a Gun (Jason Stirman)
• On Falling Over (Tom Coates)
• I almost got arrested for planting a bomb at planned parenthood (Wil Shipley)

Here’s a crappy iphone photo…

Ingredients needed

• 3/4 cup margerine (1.5 squares)
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 2 cups white all-purpose flour

(of these three additions, you can do a little more of one if you want. Like maybe 1 cup chocolate chips, 1/2 butterscotch, 1/2 walnuts. Or 1 cup walnuts 1/2 chocolate, 1/2 butterscotch. Whatever.)

• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup butterscotch chips
• 1/2 cup walnuts

Instructions

Preheat oven to 325°

Melt margarine in microwave. Mix in the sugars, vanilla, and eggs.

Add baking powder and salt.

Add flour, one cup at a time, fully mixing in between cups.

Add the walnuts, chocolate and butterscotch chips.

Roll into balls, placing on baking sheet.

Bake for about 14 mins.

I am ripped away from my dream in slow motion as Ben flys out of bed at a record rate. I don’t even see it happen. One minute he is in bed, the next he is standing at the foot of it and shouting “JESUS CHRIST OH MY GOD”

I don’t know why, but my first assumption is that he has woken up with wild diarrhea and is about to run to the bathroom, but he doesn’t move.

“WHAT? WHAT HAPPENED??”

“I was having this dream… and I could hear this scratching sound… and then I felt something scratching my arm… And I opened my eyes…. and there was a RAT. ON MY PILLOW.”

At which point I also leap out of bed.

“What do we do???”

It’s presumably the middle of the night, after all.

“I want to try and catch it. Get my hockey stick.”

“There is no way you are catching a rat with a hockey stick. We’re going to need to set traps.”

“Check my neck for bites. I thought I felt it bite me.”

I tentatively check his neck. No bites.

“Let’s just sleep in the living room.” I say.

So we go into the living room, carefully closing the bedroom door behind us and blocking off the bottom edge with a rolled up towel.

Ben immediately curls up on the couch and closes his eyes (WHAT?), but I check the time and decide it’s close enough to morning not to bother.

I go online and tweet about it, because who am I to pass up a good tweeting opportunity? I can hear faint scuffling noises, like the rat is running around in the bedroom defiling our clothing or chewing on my makeup or something.

It’s funny how scared/grossed out I am by that rat. I think I’ve read too much about the hantavirus or something.

Anyway, as I’m sitting there thinking about how badly I just want to go to work and away from the rat, I hear more scuffling sounds. But they seem to be… coming from… the kitchen.

“Ben.”

“Mm?”

“It’s… I think it’s in the kitchen cupboard.”

The sounds are loud in there, as if it’s chewing on tinfoil, and it doesn’t seem to give a shit that I’m standing very close to it and talking quite loudly.

We poke around a bit with a broom and a flashlight, but obviously didn’t see any sign of it. The chewing sounds barely abated as we poked around, the fearless little bastard.

Anyway.

I went to work. I locked up what food I could in the cabinet my mom gave me, since it has better latches than anything else in the kitchen. I emailed the building manager to see if he has any spare rat traps (we can’t be the first tenants to ever have a rat in our unit, right??). I took out the trash and instructed Ben to take out the recycling on his way to work later.

I guess we’ll buy our own rat traps tonight if the building manager doesn’t have any.

Update: Building manager replied and it sounds like we’re on our own (in short, his reply was just “Ew.”) Now I just feel embarrassed! But I swear, I clean all the time, it’s not like our house is a rat haven!

Second Update… Ben called to say the building manager DID come by and brought rat poison. Situation being dealt with. Apparently there were a bunch of rat droppings behind the fridge that we get to clean up after work. Ew.

I can’t imagine sleeping in bed again. I want to go to a hotel or something. There’s a part of me that thinks that’s extreme overreacting but another part that keeps thinking about the rat. Climbing around on Ben’s neck.

Where it came from? I have no idea.

We’re on the 3rd floor, and our window has no screen on it, so if it was a wily climber it could have climbed up and through the window perhaps. Or maybe it was already in the building and squeezed in under our front door….

Anyway. Agh!

Final(?) update – By the time we got home from work, the rat was dealt with. Poor ‘lil guy. Much cleaning ensued.

I could probably stretch these stories out into an entry long ordeal each, but I’ll just list them off because I know you don’t care if I lack embellishment, right?

When the communal dryer in my building ate my $1.50

I emailed the building manager to let him know and he didn’t offer to reimburse me, but instead asked me if I had tried put in another $1.50.

I guess I could have emailed back and been like “Well no, but that’s not the POINT,” but I just said “No I used the other dryer instead (the unspoken being “LIKE A NORMAL PERSON WOULD”)”

Except it’s a $1.50, which isn’t life altering, and I kind of like the building manager, so I didn’t want to make a big issue out of it. But he should have offered, right?

When I held the door open for someone at a coffeeshop

They went in front of me in the line up, too. (I wasn’t in a rush & I didn’t actually MIND, but I could see Larry David’s incredulous face while it was happening.)

But it did raise the question: If you beat someone to a door, but wait and hold it open for them & let them in first, does that mean they get to go ahead of you in line too?

2012, I think, was a year for self-growth. I feel like I became a little bit better at a whole lot of of life-skills. I feel like this was the year I (finally) started to transition into adulthood.

But pushing aside the fluffy stuff, here is a concrete list of major things that happened for me in 2012.

Stoic

In early February, my mom picked me up at 5am and we drove for eight hours, took a 1.5 hour ferry trip, crossed the Canada-US border, and continued to drive until we arrived in Washington.

There, we (well, she. I was just there for support) adopted an extremely large dog. This was a much bigger event for my mom than for me (he’s quite a demanding kind of dog, it turns out; is prone to carsickness, and often has explosive diarrhea. In fact, the first thing he did after my mom brought him home was poop all over the international student’s bedroom.), but it was still an experience that stuck with me throughout the year. Me and my mom, on a small road trip with a large drooling animal in the back seat. Me and my mom, going through customs together and giggling nervously, worried that we’ll seem like terrorists.

It was mother-daughter bonding at its best, and Stoic is kind of awesome too, explosive diarrhea or not.

Employment

Also in early February, I switched companies. It was a huge decision for me – I felt a lot of guilt about leaving one company for another, but it turned out to be the right choice.

Working at MetaLab has been awesome. I’m surrounded by smart/nice/funny people, I learn new things every day, and I love my work.

Car

2012 was the year of my first nice car. Goodbye old white van that stinks of exhaust whenever you try to use the heater, hello 2008 Yaris RS! Not quite a Porsche but it might as well be to me. Driving that thing has been a dream.

This was also my first ever brush with borrowing money to make a large purchase (eek!) but I am paying it off at 3x the minimum monthly rate, so hopefully I can get it over and done with ASAP.

Weddings

The first family member in my age group got married this summer, and I can’t decide if it’s a big event or not. In most ways, I think it isn’t, but I definitely sobbed a little at the wedding when they showed old childhood photos and I suddenly realized that we’re not little girls anymore.

Friends and Family

I don’t know if others would agree with me or not, but I feel like 2012 was also a year of growing closer to the people around me. I know that’s totally cheesy, but I spent way more time (but still not enough!) with my siblings than I have since I was a teenager, and strengthened relationships with a few close friends as well. I’m hoping 2013 will lead to more of this.

Happy new year!

My work gave us a week off for the holidays, which is fabulous, but I just traded that in for a different kind of work.

I haven’t had a day of non family dinners or other kinds of social obligations since last Thursday. An entire week of socializing over dinner, sometimes with people I don’t know all that well… of staying up late, of drinking wine, of taking turns being the designated driver with Ben each night.

Christmas itself was nice. Not a huge fanfare of excitement – Ben got me a nice touque, some earrings, and some new ear buds (I lost my old ones). I got him the Game of Thrones book series box set, a pack of guitar strings, and a Toblerone bar. Very low key.

As a sort of joint gift to ourselves, we also got a gym membership, so our goal is to go to the gym twice a week and attend yoga once a week – the membership includes yoga, pilates, and various dance classes, so we figured we might as well make some use of them!

Ben also plans on taking up squash more seriously, but I suck at any sports that require actual skill, so he’s on his own with that one.

Anyway. Christmas 2012! Overall a success. How was yours?

Is there anything honey CAN’T do??

So here is a ramble.

Ben and I are kind of courting the idea of moving. I love our place in a lot of ways, but it’s not very pet-friendly and it doesn’t really have much to it. No in-suite anything, other than a fridge and a stove and some really nice ocean front views.

It’s fine for what it is, and I will be sad to leave it (possibly the first and last time I will ever have a home with sweeping ocean in front of it)… so I’m feeling pretty torn.

The way I see it, we have a few options:

• Buy our own place. But based on our budget, we’d have to buy a fairly cheap condo which might kind of suck. Definitely cannot afford a house. (The cheapest POSSIBLE house for sale in Victoria right now is $369,000)
• Move into a similar place that allows pets. This would mean comparable price but the idea of not upgrading at all is kind of depressing.
• Move into a more expensive but swankier place that allows pets. This would be awesome but then it’s like, why not just go with idea #1 for that price? Home ownership is probably more important than having a penthouse with a fireplace, right?
• Stay where we are for another year or two. Which could be ok. Difficult to say. I’m mixed between restlessness and wanting to just stay where I am.

I’m kind of leaning towards buying at the moment, but really, I’m all over the map. (If you’re wondering where Ben weighs in on this, he seems to have taken a back seat approach. He wants to move, but he doesn’t care about the logistics.)

Anyway, I guess nothing will happen right away but the idea is floating around out there!

Here are some then & now photos because I love then & now photos – 2007 vs 2012:

Us in early 2008 – Mexico. Looking all young and adorable.

This summer, looking all serious.

Not much else to say… maybe I could write about Vancouver but it just rained a lot and that was about it.

I will try to do something different in the near future, before I drive everyone away with my obsessing.

But for now, here’s another one.

I don’t know if they should be called cookies or if they should be called biscuits – they have a thick texture and are spongy like cake. They aren’t too sweet or heavy.

They are a very ‘adult’ tasting cookie.

Nutritional Information per Cookie

• Makes about 34 cookies

Honey is much higher in calories than processed sugar (1 cup of honey = 1031; 1 cup sugar = 774). So even though I feel like using honey is ‘healthier’ and more natural, it is higher in calories!

• Calories: 151.3
• Sugars: 13.8 g
• Carbs: 24.2 g

I ate so freaking many of these while I was making them. Baking is dangerous.

Wet Ingredients

• 1 cup butter
• 1.5 cups honey
• 2 eggs
• 1.5tsp vanilla extract

Dry Ingredients

• 4 cups of flour
• .25 cup of granulated sugar
• 1tsp baking soda
• 1tsp ground ginger
• 1stp ground cinnamon
• .5tsp ground nutmeg
• Feel free to fudge around with the spices. I don’t think you could go wrong by adding quite a bit more of something if you have a flavour preference!

Step One: Mix honey, sugar, and butter on stovetop

The most annoying part of the whole recipe – in a saucepan over a low heat stove, melt butter into honey and sugar. Stir with wooden spoon while it melts.

Once it’s done melting, put the saucepan aside to cool and move on to step two.

Step Two: Add everything but the flour

In a large bowl add the eggs, baking soda, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Whisk together and then pour your honey mixture over it.

Step Three: Add Flour

Add flour one cup at a time, mixing in fully between cups.

Step Four: Bake

I rolled my cookies into balls before placing on the pan. As you can see from the finished product, there are two looks – the round ones and the jagged ones. The jagged ones were not rolled into balls because at first I was scared that the dough would be super sticky from all the honey and didn’t want it all over my hands. Hint: It wasn’t.

Bake at 350° for about ten minutes. Keep an eye on them – they’re easy to mess up if you put them in for too long or too short.

Step Five: Eat

Best served with a hot pot of tea.

Warning: I am calling these cookies, but they are only mildly sweet. They are not a dessert cookie, and they are definitely not meant to be eaten alone. Eat with tea or don’t eat at all.