constant vigilance! and other lessons from being robbed

My handbag was snatched as I was walking home at night last week. Some dude came up behind me on his bike and grabbed it, and took off. I yelled, but there was no one around, and I happened to be wearing heels that night so the chase was rather short. This happened within a couple of blocks from home, so I ran home, rang the doorbell like crazy and got Seb to call the police.

The night of, I was just shocked. Couldn't believe it happened. I couldn't tell the police anything of much use, since I only saw the back of the guy's hoodie, but I spent most of the night unable to sleep, brooding over the scene in my mind. By next morning, I guess the shock had worn off, and I was really mad. How dare this guy steal my stuff! What an asshole! Fueled by my fury, I spent a couple of hours prowling around the area where my stuff was taken, looking suspiciously at anyone on a bike, to see if the thieves had discarded anything. I kept going over what happened in my mind, to see if I could have done something differently.

I was regretting that I hadn't taken off my shoes and thrown them at the perp as he was making his getaway, when the police called to say that someone had turned my stuff in. Along a little side street within a few of blocks of home, one of the residents had found my bag on a bench in front of their house. Missing was the cash and my phone.

I was happy to get my stuff back - at least I would be spared some of the replacement expenses - but at best I had mixed feelings. I was thankful to the person who had turned my stuff in, but I was still really angry that this had happened at all. But I was also starting to think that it could definitely have been a lot worse.

So the lesson here is this: These things happen when they happen, even in "safe" parts of town, and the best you can do is minimize the chances that the thieves will choose you as their victim. Like, always be aware of your surroundings, especially when there aren't a lot of people around, look around to see if someone is coming up behind you. When in doubt, just take a taxi. Even if you are generally paranoid about these things, the thieves will choose to strike the one time you didn't stick your cash and credit cards in your sock and you're wearing heels instead of sneakers. So constant vigilance! Because it could happen to you too.

Bright red bird at the Biodome

Little monkey at the Biodome

Know thyself

Among the things I've done in the past few months, there are a couple of things I can point to and say "I have accomplished THIS." First is the MCAT that I wrote in mid-September, and the second is the mémoire for my Masters of Statistics. The grueling, torturous struggle I went through to complete the latter, in particular, has driven home the fact that a career in academics is not for me. I'm just not that into it. I'm not good at forcing myself to slog through a research problem for months and months and produce a paper on some undetermined timetable. The satisfaction I get out of it is insufficient. There's always something that could be fixed, something that could be improved, something that should be justified further, explained better. In short, I'm a tad too perfectionist for this, and never fully satisfied with my final product. But at the same time, I really enjoy learning new stuff. I had a total blast the year I was taking courses for my Masters in Geneva. It was stressful, but very fulfilling. Which brings me to the first thing: the MCAT. I studied two and a half weeks for it, starting when I first decided to write the thing. And I got a very good score, in the 97th percentile or so (except for the essay part, I suck at writing essays under time pressure). And this was very satisfying, I felt well repaid for the time I spent studying like a maniac.

So why is this so? In terms of hours spent working, I'm sure I worked more in the year I was taking courses. In terms of acute stress, I'm sure I was a lot more stressed during exam time than at any point in the year I spent working on my mémoire. Yet I felt more depressed, more discouraged, more dissatisfied, and less well working on it. Taking into account my experience with the crazy MCAT business, I think my talent is learning stuff and then taking an exam. And I enjoy it. Which leads me to conclude that I should find a career as a student. Anyone want to hire me as a professional student?

Things I miss

This weekend is the wine festival in Bourgogne. We went both years we were in Geneva, taken there by some generous wine-loving friends. These two occasions are among my fondest memories of Europe. (I confess that thoughts of the wine figure rather more prominently than they perhaps should in my daydreams of living in Europe again.) As I think back to the good times we had, I can almost smell the wine fermenting in oaky barrels ... the dim lighting in the wine cellar ... the crunch of the salty homemade crackers in between mouthfuls of wine ... racks upon racks of dusty wine bottles...

Here are a few pictures, while I go soak in the nostalgia...





"Mais du Bourgogne tout le temps." Indeed.

Winter is coming

Today, as I was walking through Rittenhouse Square, I saw a little three or four year old boy chasing pigeons. I couldn't help noticing that the pigeons were looking rather more plump than usual. Stocking up for winter, no doubt.

So much for sleeping in

A bunch of workmen are doing some heavy work in the apartment next to ours, which apparently involves a circular saw and a lot of banging and hammering. They started at 7am today. A Sunday morning. In Switzerland, they would be shot.

Miroton

This is from waay back when we last made roast beef, and while the roast beef itself was really good, the miroton I made from the leftovers was totally out of this world. A miroton is basically made from thin slices of leftover beef baked in a stock in the oven with butter-melted onions. I added some mushrooms to the mix as well. Luckily I had quite a bit of gravy left over from the roast beef, which likely boosted the yumminess quotient by 200%. First I sweated a good quantity of onions in a pot very slowly with some butter for about 40 minutes. Meanwhile, I sliced and sautéed the mushrooms, and sliced the leftover beef thinly. When the onions were ready, I deglazed them with some red wine vinegar (also characteristic of a miroton), and added the gravy and mushrooms. I also added a healthy portion of wine and let it simmer for a while. I arranged the slices of beef in a shallow baking dish, and poured the sauce over them, so that they were all more or less covered. Then I sprinkled the top with breadcrumbs and baked it for an hour and a half or so. Roast beef will initially toughen if you recook it this way, so you need to bake the miroton for an hour or longer. This was serious, serious deliciousness: the kind where you lie awake at night remembering how good it was a month later. Mmm. Now I'm contemplating making a roast beef just for the miroton that is to follow.

Talk about mollycoddling!

A Japanese girl who's been studying english in Philly for the past 6 months called me up last night. I had invited her to a couple of parties chez nous, but I hadn't heard from her in months. She's going back to Japan next Monday. She said she has all this luggage, so she's thinking of calling a taxi to get to the airport. Sounds like a good idea, I said. Could I tell her how it's done? Umm, okay, hold on, let me look up the phone number of the taxi company... You just call and ask them to send a taxi to your address. They might want to know the airline and your destination, so you should have your itinerary in front of you, I said. After a short pause, she asked if I could call a taxi for her. Ummm, okaaaay, I suppose I could. (Although if you can't call a taxi for yourself after over six months of language school in another country, clearly there is something wrong.) I know and I sympathise with the difficulties in learning a language, and particularly for shy japanese people. But I would like to think that I would be too ashamed of myself to ask someone else to call a taxi for me after having studied the language intensively for six months. At the very least, I would offer to buy the person a coffee or something.

Brr ... yet again

Since I arrived back in Montreal, the weather has been gorgeous. Warm, very sunny, but not too hot. Until yesterday, when it started to rain. Now it's 3 degrees celsius, and raining. And cold. They've shut off the heating in the building (it is the middle of May after all, we're more likely to need the air-conditioning), so I've resorted to wearing big sweaters. The weather forecast says it might snow tonight. Did I mention that it's cold? I feel like curling up in a nice warm blanket with a good book.

Going through my stuff

I'm trying to go through the stuff in my room, getting rid of junk and packing stuff I want to keep in boxes. Not an easy proposition. I am rather attached to my stuff, and even though I haven't needed these things in the years I've been away, I still have psychological difficulties letting go of it. Old photos and keepsakes, bringing back so many memories! ... and other assorted junk. One thing is certain however: I should never need to buy any more pens or pencils ever again in my life. I've found piles of old pens and pencils, because every year when I was in school I bought new ones without disposing of the previous batch. (It was part of the back-to-school ritual: new pens and notebooks = fresh new start!) Now I have more pens than I or anyone in my family could possibly need. Knowing myself though, this will not stop me from buying new ones.

Home sweet Montreal

Back home in Montreal - I still think of it as home, even though it's been four years or so that I haven't really lived here. I was walking randomly through the downtown area the other day, just soaking up the atmosphere, thinking how great it is to be back. As I was walking, I could feel a whole layer of - something - peeling right off. Self-defensiveness (is that a word?), or aloofness? It's not that I actively worry about getting mugged in Philly, but certainly I feel the need to be more vigilant when I'm there. I generally act rather like I don't see anyone when I'm walking in Philly, a sort of preemptive measure against solicitations and aggressive panhandlers. (Perhaps this is also why I see so many more people talking into their cell phones as they walk in Philly compared to Montreal.) Here, I feel so much more comfortable just sauntering about, looking at the people and buildings around me, a simple "non, désolé" sufficing to turn down a panhandler on the street corner, with a smile if he wishes me good day.

Be thankful for your toilet

Yesterday, there was a water leak in our building in the apartment just below us, flooding several apartments. We were lucky enough to escape that, but our cold water was shut off for the day until the plumber came in this morning to fix it. We did have hot water, it wasn't too much of a problem. Except for the toilet. Every flush of the toilet required two trips to the kitchen sink to fill the bucket with hot water, opening the toilet tank, pouring the water in, etc. Because of this, every toilet use was carefully considered and weighed - is it worthwhile to go right now? Can it wait? So today I am particularly thankful for having a functioning toilet. (Seriously, if there's a flu pandemic or some sort of massive emergency and we lose our water, we are so screwed.)

Something old, something new, something seasonal

I start planning a menu from the moment a dinner party is in the works. There are several factors to be considered: the number of guests, any dietary restrictions, how much time there is to prepare, etc. The main dish - usually meat - is generally the first to be decided. The appetizer and the dessert are generally settled upon next. With the general framework of the dinner menu set up, I start filling in the details - what kind of soup? what kind of salad? what vegetables to serve with the meat? I consult recipe books and recipe notes, and start making lists. A list of ingredients, a list of courses, shopping lists tailored to shopping destination, to-do lists ... I would be lost without them.

Most courses are made up of old standbys, foods we have made before and are confident of pulling off successfully. However, I do try to include at least one new thing in the menu that we haven't tried before. For our big dinner last week, our new thing was the trou normand. A trou normand can be considered as a palate-cleanser or refresher between the first and main courses of the meal. It is also thought to aid digestion and stimulate the appetite in the middle of a long meal. The traditional Normandy version is a shot of Calvados (apple brandy), although more recently it's served as a bit of Calvados poured over some apple sorbet. These days there are many variations, although the common factor is the combination of a sorbet with a spirit. We decided to go with a lemon sorbet and vodka combination. We made the sorbet the night before. The important thing about making sorbet without an ice cream machine is to take it out of the freezer every once in a while, to break up the ice crystals with a hand mixer.

I also try to include at least one seasonal food item in the menu. This time, we decided to go with asparagus in the soup, as in a cream of asparagus. The soup was also made the night before - if I may add, with the chicken broth I made a few weeks ago.

So the final menu we settled upon looked something like this:

Cheeses
Moules Marinière (mussels in white wine sauce)
Salade de Chèvre Chaud (grilled goat cheese salad)
Cream of Asparagus soup
Trou Normand
Roast Beef with gravy
-baked potato with sour cream and green onion sauce
-maple-caramelized carrots with almonds
Crème Brûlée

We always question whether to serve the cheese at the very beginning of the meal, or at the end like the French do. (I like to serve them at the beginning, because people are generally too full to enjoy the cheese by the end.) We were a bit lax with the roast beef and the crème brûlée, resulting in an overcooked roast and water in the crème. (I confess I was rather tipsy by this point in the meal as well.) This was rather unfortunate, because the rest of the dinner went off rather splendidly. (Well, I guess there was also that problem with miscounting the number of guests.) Fortunately, our guests were gracious about it. We topped it all off with a bottle of Canadian ice wine. Delicious.

I can't count

We had a dinner party on Saturday evening. Giving nice dinners is something we like to do, and generally it takes several days of preparation. So I was going to write a series of rather pretentious blog posts on planning and hosting a nice dinner party, from menu planning, shopping for ingredients, preparing the food, etc. I even took a few photos of the preparation process. The cooking started in earnest on Friday evening, and all day Saturday. By Saturday at 5pm, I had laid out a nice tablecloth on our dining table, and Seb had set the table for 8 people (the maximum possible, as we have only 8 chairs in the apartment).

Saturday evening just after 7pm, our guests start arriving. When about half our guests were assembled, is when the realization hits me. Holy crap, we are NINE. NINE people. Now, I'm rather prone to full-blown panic in these kinds of situations, but luckily Seb stepped in before the panic-meter got too high. "I'll just go borrow a chair from our neighbours," he said, cool as a cucumber (never mind that we barely know our neighbours). And thus, disaster was averted. Thankfully, the food worked out. The only number-specific food that we didn't have enough of was the baked potato (I had only made eight), but the table was so crowded that I don't think anyone noticed. In retrospect, I can't believe I could've mistaken the number of guests: I counted them last week, more than once. But I laugh at it now, and it's situations like this that remind me never to be so cocksure of myself.

Brrr

Two weeks ago, it was 27 degrees celsius in Philadelphia, the flowers were blooming, and people were out and about in shorts and t-shirts. We were even obliged to turn the air-conditioning on a couple of times. Then, spring stopped dead in its tracks. The temperature dropped down to 5 degrees. "Ah," thought I, "a little cold snap. Well, I'm from Canada, I can take it. Besides it won't last long." People went back to wearing their winter coats and scarves. It snowed. It's been two weeks since we had warm weather. Today I went out with a scarf and gloves, and I WAS STILL COLD. Là, c'est assez. Give me back my spring!

On unexpected guests, and tidy apartments

I am not a cleaning kind of person. While I do prefer clean to mess, and I have made several resolutions to clean more often and more regularly, I just don't enjoy it. Our apartment has a tendency to devolve from tidy to messy, and stay that way until we're expecting guests over. Only then am I sufficiently motivated to clean the place.

Thursday evening, as I'm making supper (Japanese curry, if you're curious), I got a call from Seb:
"Plam's at the airport. He'll be arriving as soon as he figures out the public transport to get to our place."

It had been a few weeks since we had anyone over, so our apartment was starting to be on the messy side. Moreover, this was rather short notice. I confess I was rather panicked. Plam undoubtedly remembers the unholy mess of Seb's bachelor apartment days but ... well, I have certain standards to uphold. Cue Benny Hill music as I tidied up the apartment on speed, cleaning the bathroom in record time, vacuuming the kitchen with one hand whilst stirring the curry pot with the other. Plam arrived just after I finished my frenetic cleaning session. We had a nice dinner, and I hope he is none the wiser. (Until he sees this blog post, I guess.)

There is a lesson here, which I hope I will take to heart, about keeping the apartment presentably clean at all times.

Sake Festival

Seb and I went to the Sake Festival tonight. It's one of the events in the Cherry Blossom Festival that's going on right now. It felt a bit like a convention slash buffet. There were tables serving food, and other tables serving sake. You basically went around, picked up a small plate of food here, a little cup of sake there, etc. I would have liked to ask more questions, but the people behind the tables were pretty busy serving people. And there were A LOT of people attending. I suppose this makes it a success. The first table I approached was serving little cubes of yellowtail with a cilantro/olive sauce (I think) which was quite yummy. But I asked the girl behind the table what kind of sake I should have it with, and she said "that's a good question. Honestly I have no idea." Hmm, I thought I would be learning about sake/food pairings here?! Some tables did have little tasting notes such as "try --- sake with the teriyaki chicken from *** restaurant!" but I wasn't about to fight my way through the crowds just to find it. Can't say I learned much about pairing sake with food, but there was good food, and there was good sake. I can't complain much. One of the most popular foods was the sushi from Genji Sushi. They were making an endless stream of salmon nigiri at their table (salmon in Japanese is sake), and people were eating them faster than they could churn them out.

Tooth extraction update

I'm sure you're all fascinated. :) I went to the dentist's again this morning to get the sutures out. I had to go to the other office because my regular dentist is on vacation. (Incidentally, he only works three days a week as it is. Nice life he has, no?) There was some minor difficulty in cutting the sutures; they hadn't loosened during the week, and my gums were swollen in that area. It pinched a bit, and the dentist mentioned that he might have to numb the area, but he got it in the end. It actually hurts less now. I still get something of an ache in my jaw, but nothing the Motrin can't handle. Seriously, I am impressed by the effectiveness of the Motrin.

Hey cool

Just now, I noticed that peope have been leaving comments here and there on my blog for the past couple of years. I hadn't even seen them until now. Wow, there are more than 2 people reading my blog??