Category: Totally Random

Last week I wrote about wanting to make bourbon lemonades, so Kinnon and I gave it a whirl on Monday night. We followed the Smitten Kitchen “Vermontucky Lemonade” instructions and used bourbon, water, lemon juice, and maple syrup, and they were amazing.  Here’s the recipe:

Mix in a pitcher:
1 cup lemon juice (if you’re too lazy to squeeze lemons, get the good stuff at the grocery store)
2.5 cups cold water
0.5 cups maple syrup (again, use the good stuff)

Put ice and however much bourbon you want in a glass, and then pour the lemonade mixture over top to fill your glass. Stir slightly, and enjoy. Mmmmmmm.  We used Bulleit Bourbon, and next time we’ll try Knob Creek or Four Roses.

 

 

I usually drink white wine in the summer, with the occasional beer, margarita or even a gin and tonic for variety. But a couple weeks ago I had bourbon lemonade (pictured above) at Hogtown Smoke with my pal Hilary. It was delicious.

I need to figure out how to make them so I can now drink bourbon lemonades all summer long. Do you have a good recipe? I’ve found some online that suggest using triple sec or maple syrup in addition to the lemonade and bourbon, for sweetness. Or this recipe on The Kitchn suggests using honey bourbon with lemon juice, sugar and water. I guess I’ll have to try a few different recipes to find which one I like best. Sounds like a fun experiment.

I took off a few hours from work today to put the finishing touches on our new backyard, and I’m so happy to say it’s done! We just finished a 3-week long full overhaul. Our old deck, shed, walkway and pathetic grass patches were full removed, and a new patio, deck, and gardens were put in (with proper drainage and grading and all that not-so-sexy-but-all-so-important stuff). We worked with Ted Hobson and his crew from Hobson Landscapes, and they did an *amazing* job. I highly recommend them. Lots more photos of before, during, and after the landscaping after the jump…

Continue reading “Before and After Pics of Our New Backyard”

I love Richard Linklater. The “Before” series (Before Sunset, Before Sunrise, Before Midnight) are some of my all-time favourite films. I even enjoy his goofy stuff, like School of Rock and Dazed and Confused.

When I heard about his latest film Boyhood, I was blown away. It took Linklater twelve years to make the film. That means he started it in 2001 (woah… can you remember what you were doing in 2001?).  He filmed the same cast for a few days every year, slowly piecing together a story about a boy growing up. The film is fiction (this isn’t a documentary) but it was made in real-time (the star of the film, Ellar Coltrane, was seven years old when they started; now he’s 19).

Sounds cool, but also a bit gimmicky, right?  Hopefully not with Richard Linklater. I hope he brings the same amount of depth and thoughtful nuance to Boyhood that shows in the “Before” series.

What an amazing project. The movie comes out in July. Watch the trailer here.

[via Kottke.org]

Whoa, this is cool. Google Street view now allows you to select a time period, so you can see the same view over a few years (depending on how long Google has been indexing that location).  I was able to look at my house and neighbourhood from 2007, before we moved in.  It’s crazy how much has changed. Check out the photos above of the Ceili Cottage, my neighbourhood local, and how it changed from an auto-body shop in 2009 to the awesome pub it is now.

Read about Google Street view’s time travel feature, or watch the marketing video explaining it.

This isn’t the kind of thing I usually share on my blog (I don’t tend to talk about work stuff here all that much), but I wanted to tell you all about this online course I took on SkillShare, called Get Stuff Done Like a Boss.  It’s a class built around the Getting Things Done methodology.

For the past year or so, I’ve been trying to figure out better tools to help me stay on top of my workload and manage my email inbox (the amount of emails I receive every day is totally overwhelming).  I tried a number of great email tricks, but I never really got to the root of the problem – things were sitting in my email inbox, instead of being filtered out into actions or saved as resources.

Also, I was often thinking about things that needed to be done, but wasn’t consistently writing them down, so my to-do list plagued my brain.  I got quite stressy at times, and thought I had finally found my limit and needed to dial back the amount of work I was doing.

NOT TRUE!  I can totally handle all my stuff, I just needed more reliable systems in place to collect, process, and do it all. It’s been about 3 weeks since I started the Get Stuff Done Like a Boss class (which consists of short video lessons and some PDF resources) and I’m a total convert to the Getting Things Done method.

I’m now much more productive than before, and I’m honestly less stressed.  I get more done in less time.  Of course, it took a while to learn and adopt the methodology, but it really did make a difference.

If you want to try it out, I have a $10 off link for new SkillShare learners. The Getting Things Done class is normally $29, but if you click this link and then sign up, you’ll get it for $19.

(This is not a sponsored post – I honestly just love this class and wanted to share it with you)

Psst – my birthday is coming up in April, and if anyone’s looking for something totally random and awesome to get me, this has got to be it: The Portlandia Activity Book.  It will be released at the end of February by publishing-house-of-all-cool-things, McSweeney’s.  The book promises “enough activities to get you through a year’s worth of rainy days, including: How to Crowdfund Your Baby, Punk Paint By Numbers, Terrarium Foraging, and so much more.”

There’s a short preview available on the website.

 

Wow, what a year it’s been. Just for fun, I decided to do a bit of a list – 2013 By the Numbers. You can read it here.

Happy New Year!

We got hit with a nasty ice storm last night in Toronto.  There are 300,000 people without power, so we’re lucky the lights (and internet connection) are still on over here. We spent the day indoors, and Clara was allowed to stay in her pyjamas all day, which she thought was the coolest thing ever. At one point I went out in the backyard to take pictures and to de-ice the car (which took a few litres of boiling water, followed by 30 minutes of running the defrost).  Here are some photos I took, if you’d like to see.  Hope you’re safe, warm, and dry wherever you are!