Sitting tight

There's a meme floating around, look up and post the distance (and driving time--it's a US meme) between your childhood and current homes. I didn't bother looking anything up: I know that my childhood home, meaning the house I lived in from ages 5 to 18, is about an hour and a half from my current home by subway.

When I mentioned to someone at work that I spent New Year's with family in Montreal, they asked whether I'd grown up there.

The oddity, for a New Yorker, isn't that I have family (blood and choice) in three countries: it's that this is true and I was born and raised in this city of immigrants.

Sitting tight

There's a meme floating around, look up and post the distance (and driving time--it's a US meme) between your childhood and current homes. I didn't bother looking anything up: I know that my childhood home, meaning the house I lived in from ages 5 to 18, is about an hour and a half from my current home by subway.

When I mentioned to someone at work that I spent New Year's with family in Montreal, they asked whether I'd grown up there.

The oddity, for a New Yorker, isn't that I have family (blood and choice) in three countries: it's that this is true and I was born and raised in this city of immigrants.

Odd relationship thought, or, I think my metaphor is running away with me

This was sparked by reading an apa a day or two ago:

I have a committed, important, and deeply emotional relationship with the English language. It is, of course, thoroughly non-exclusive on both sides, though while many others know and love English as deeply as I do, I'm not nearly as entangled with any other language--not even Spanish--as I am with English. In fact, my relationship with English is as deep and important as it is in part because of how many other people have similar relationships. That shared love and commitment to a language enables me to communicate with--and sometimes love--other people in a way that we wouldn't without a common language.

Odd relationship thought, or, I think my metaphor is running away with me

This was sparked by reading an apa a day or two ago:

I have a committed, important, and deeply emotional relationship with the English language. It is, of course, thoroughly non-exclusive on both sides, though while many others know and love English as deeply as I do, I'm not nearly as entangled with any other language--not even Spanish--as I am with English. In fact, my relationship with English is as deep and important as it is in part because of how many other people have similar relationships. That shared love and commitment to a language enables me to communicate with--and sometimes love--other people in a way that we wouldn't without a common language.

A few food notes from Montreal

I trusted my impulse when we went for a late breakfast/early lunch at Quai d'Oeuf (which I may be misspelling), near Atwater Market: having liked the meal I had there with papersky last summer, I decided to risk their French toast. It was excellent. Being Quebecois rather than French, they call it pain doré rather than pain perdu; being Canadian, they served it with real maple syrup. More to the point, the raisin bread was good and they soaked it in the right amount of egg-and-milk. (I'm rather picky about this, and most places it comes out either too dry or too soggy for my taste.) The sausages were good too.

It's not a good year for citrus: both clementines and fresh-squeezed orange juice were disconcertingly sour much of the time. Back home, I finally got a crate of really satisfactory clementines, the first since the South African ones I bought in September. I'm going to have to keep going by eye, guesswork, and optimism: these are Spanish and marketed through Ocean Spray, but I had unsatisfactory Spanish Ocean Spray clementines a few weeks ago.

Mustard isn't necessary on pate de canard, but it's not a bad idea either. papersky and zorinth were both skeptical: I'd said yes when the deli worker offered mustard, once we'd sorted out that I was ordering a pate-on-baguette sandwich, not a toasted baguette for my breakfast.

The Pacific Sun tea I brought home with me looks odd. I don't think there was anything blue in the tea of that blend that Papersky gave me. But I got this at the same place. It also didn't taste quite as good, but that could be mood, congestion affecting my taste buds, or subconscious effects of knowing that tea isn't supposed to be blue and that while this does have dried fruit in it I've never seen a dried fruit that's such a bright blue.

A few food notes from Montreal

I trusted my impulse when we went for a late breakfast/early lunch at Quai d'Oeuf (which I may be misspelling), near Atwater Market: having liked the meal I had there with papersky last summer, I decided to risk their French toast. It was excellent. Being Quebecois rather than French, they call it pain doré rather than pain perdu; being Canadian, they served it with real maple syrup. More to the point, the raisin bread was good and they soaked it in the right amount of egg-and-milk. (I'm rather picky about this, and most places it comes out either too dry or too soggy for my taste.) The sausages were good too.

It's not a good year for citrus: both clementines and fresh-squeezed orange juice were disconcertingly sour much of the time. Back home, I finally got a crate of really satisfactory clementines, the first since the South African ones I bought in September. I'm going to have to keep going by eye, guesswork, and optimism: these are Spanish and marketed through Ocean Spray, but I had unsatisfactory Spanish Ocean Spray clementines a few weeks ago.

Mustard isn't necessary on pate de canard, but it's not a bad idea either. papersky and zorinth were both skeptical: I'd said yes when the deli worker offered mustard, once we'd sorted out that I was ordering a pate-on-baguette sandwich, not a toasted baguette for my breakfast.

The Pacific Sun tea I brought home with me looks odd. I don't think there was anything blue in the tea of that blend that Papersky gave me. But I got this at the same place. It also didn't taste quite as good, but that could be mood, congestion affecting my taste buds, or subconscious effects of knowing that tea isn't supposed to be blue and that while this does have dried fruit in it I've never seen a dried fruit that's such a bright blue.