high school

(And again, much of this dream is lost to the ether.) My friend Emily had to stop by her school to pick something up. (Actually in her late 20s and not in high school at all) she was attending an all-girl boarding school, but the school was empty when we went in. We entered the one story building, full of work spaces; under a massive central table were hundreds of used paperback books. I fell to checking the titles. Emily said she had read "The Catcher in the Rye" but didn't like *her* writing much. I responded that that J.D. Salinger is a man. I found a copy in amongst the books, to prove it, but suddenly the title changed: it was a collection of short stories that I hadn't read yet, by Salinger. And then the cover changed again, and it wasn't Salinger at all.

impromptu dinner party...with 3 reds...!

I mean, c'mon. Not three bottles of red, on a Thursday night? No no no, children, do not worry. One we had started last night, a Chateau Potensac (Medoc, 2003), to get Krstn warmed up to see Christina Aguilera at the Bell Centre. After she left, I nearly polished it off, but we still had a glass left over for the next day. The second bottle was a full-bodied Spanish Roble, PradoRey 2004, rich, robust, blackberry overtones, a bit corse, tannins, bouquet...all the good stuff, and brought by our dinner guest, Harris Newman (with whom I made a contract that night). And finally, when all that was done, we opened the mini-bottle of Italian Valpolicella 2005: light and delicious (I must say that these small bottles were a present for Krstn, who turned thirty a couple of weeks ago. She got presents on the theme of 1/3. So these are 1/3 bottles of wine...clever, no?) Anyway, I drank more than anyone else and woke up with a hangover.

Thursday comfort food

Trans-Europe smuggling adventure

I was on a covert and possibly criminal journey in Europe. It started out at a place resembling my parents' house, where we were hiding the body of a dead man. He was Eastern European. We were trying to honour him according to his tradition, but were afraid that his family would find out where he was because of the candles.

Then I was given tickets and a fake passport, with the plan of setting off on a possibly risky journey... I and this guy, a stranger, were smuggling or stealing something, it wasn't clear. He and I rode on a series of trains that ended up in Amsterdam. We were sneaking around in a warehouse at the Amsterdam train station. My companion was caught, and hung on a noose. I rescued him by undoing the noose. We got back on a train. Then I seduced him.

I never loved Eva Peron...

Tonight, I warmed up a delicious dinner from a couple of nights ago: exotic French mushrooms (Russelo, maybe?) sauted with onions and garlic, heavy cream and a little of this Reserva de Peron 2006 added to make a lovely sauce, and then you get the chicken breasts stirred in? (locally farmed, from the butcher, and supposedly "happy" chickens)...you get the picture. A delicious dinner the first time around, and even better rewarmed. We finally polished off the 250ml bottle of white. (Another white?)

So who would have thought that a Montreal paper maker, Kruger owns Reserva de Peron, thanks to an investment by the FTQs Fonds de solidarite?

Kirsten didn't know what to make of it. I said it was like drinking a bottle of perfume.

With hints of blackberry and... ladybug

According to the The American Chemical Society, ladybugs make a bad stink that can wreck wine. What's more, this smell comes about when ladybugs inadvertently get mixed in with the juice during the winemaking process. Mmmmm....

fragment: living in New York City

a lot had already happened in this dream, lost to the ether. I am someplace in Manhattan, with elevated highways flashing around me in concrete swirls, and I am trying to get home. Home is off island, somewhere in New Jersey, North West. I am looking at a map of the neighbourhoods up there, mine included. Each neighbourhood has its own distinctive road pattern, with a central square (actually, a circle). Mine is hardwood: and indeed, not only the map looks like hardwood, but the central square itself is made of hardwood, like a huge dancefloor. The buses don't go to the central square, but park and wait on side streets just off the central square. My map shows the bus 66 stops just near where I live. And (in my dream) the 66 leaves from the Plateau (!). So all I have to do is find out where the 66 stops here on the Plateau (in Manhattan?)... (hey, it's a dream. Leave me alone.)

Visit to the scary house

For years now I've had a recurring dream about a big, old scary house. The house sits just on the edge of my childhood home, visible but not always accessible to me. Earlier versions of the dream featured the house with a scary, very small attic compartment that my brother and I would climb into sometimes.

But lately, I've been going into the house and hanging out in its rooms. Various people live/stay there at various times. This time, a friend of mine is living in the attic. She is staying there with a bunch of her friends who I don't know. I go upstairs to visit. It's rickety and a bit scary. But she seems happy there, living like a student with several people camped out on the bare floors, sleeping in sleeping bags.

another sex dream

Sorry, I can't share the details on this one either, but it was hot.

Pint-sized delicious.

Oh yeaaaaahhh... this one is pint-sized. And with the little, shiny red screw top, I just want to rip it off and guzzle it down. Tout de sweet.

But I didn't. And besides, I had to share. My impression: smelled comforting. A sweet, little quickie, but ultimately, unmemorable.

a little bottle, a lot of punch

So, we are just back from the Secret Store, where we bought a bunch of great things. Myself, I got some black shoes and a green shirt, like new. Krstn bought a bunch of new clothes, including a sexy top. But I digress. While I tended to the little morsel's every need, Krstn whipped up a little tortellini: something with garlic and fresh baby spinach, tomatoes, garlic, oil and some beet greens doused with butter, on the side. We cracked open a 250ml bottle of J.P. Chenet's Cabernet Syrah (Pays d'oc). No date. There is a warning on the bottle: Contains Sulphates. Also, you cannot access their top secret website. Hmmm. Mysterious, isn't it? Still, the little stumpy was quite delicious.

Speedy, speedy turtle, speedy turtle...

Ahhh... the white wine. You know a red wine drinker is broke when she digs into the back of the fridge and pulls out that bottle of white that someone left behind at a party. Well, we did it (much like we drank the leftover sake earlier this week). And ended up with Speedy Turtle, a wine that claims to be good with "sushis".

At first sip, Speedy Turtle tasted like those little flower-flavoured jelly candies that old ladies like: a bit rosy, a bit like lavender. Curious. It was a wine that spoke one syllable at a time, like Yertle the turtle. Speedy Turtle, Argentina, no year, no specific grape.

Suckling a pet rat

I dreamed that I was breastfeeding my six-month-old daughter and then she turned into a rat. [Now I must qualify this, because I used to have pet rats and they're really very sweet and cuddly...] Anyway, the rat bit me on the nipple and made it bleed. A lot. After I buttoned up, the blood continued coming through the front of my shirt.

White wine?

It is a rare day that we will drink a white wine. I am not sure why that is, because white is really quite delicious. Maybe we know that are distinct health benefits to red wine, that we don't associate with white. And the only reason we drink wine is for its health benefits. But last night, after a whole week of the gastro, and with only a bottle of white in the whole house, we opted for sacraficing our delicious Argentine white: The Savage Dog. I will let krstn describe its delicate talents.

...robbing a bank...

there had been much dream before this point, but I remember I was part of a team that was going up in several elevators to the 14th floor, which was entirely taken up with the offices of a bank or something like that. Some people were going to cause a diversion while others were going to rob certain things. As I was going up in the elevator, there were a couple of guys, maybe American tourists, with a handheld video camera, and I invited them to make a documentary of the event that was about to take place. So the elevator doors open, and we are on the 14th floor
(elevators in the middle, all offices have windows facing out from the elevator stacks). I am walking along the hallway, and I see that the diversion has started. So I dash into an office and hide behind the door. A man who seems to be the bank manager, hardly older than 25, looks up from his desk and asks me what I am doing. I motion out in the hallway, he sees the disturbance, and then dashes to the front of his desk and starts to roll up these Arctic prints, some of which are no larger than a bumber sticker. I am helping him, and get to look at one or two in detail. One I remember is a simple style, a few figures on a plain background in two or three colours: shades of orange and blue-green (unusual colours for an arctic print, I remember thinking). The figure is of a man or a dog on an ice flow and a simple house in the corner. The banker is desperate to hide the prints. There is some very very small writing on the prints, careful small letters written in sharp pencil. The town it came from was Pond Inlet. I knew that the person who wrote this was a woman. I wake up.

a little sake on a Wednesday night...

Krstn and I have been sick as dogs with the gastro since Tuesday, two days after little Jello-belly got it. Her little football tummy convulsed as one muscle, throwing the contents of her bottle across the hardwood floor. But by last night, I was ready for a tiny tiny little bit of something. We had had white spaghetti with oil and parmesan for late lunch, around 430pm. Later in the evening, I warmed up the last inch of a bottle of Shobu Gekkeikan Sake (a "good sake", the kind you normally drink cold) that has been taking up space in the door of the fridge since Christmas. It was nice, but my stomach wouldn't let me finish even a half of a half of a glass. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this one.

Skiing on dirt -- a.k.a. the pear dream

I dreamed that I was skiing at Whistler. I was waiting for my friends/family to show up at the lodge and decided to do a couple runs in the meantime. So I went up the lift on my own, skied down a short run and got back on the lift and went up again. This time there were big patches of well-groomed grass in the snow. I skied over it and went back down to the lift.

The third time up, I skied over to the side and there was a bridge, leading to an orchard where earthy types were grooming trees ripe with pears. This was a side project at Whistler to accommodate the resort to global warming. I went over the bridge on my skis and looked at the trees. Then I skied back to the hill, which no longer had grass nor snow, just dirt. I knew that this was the fast effect of global warming. I skied, with difficulty, over the dirt on my way back to the lodge.

Chat with Jason's dad in the 1970s

I had a mid-afternoon dream where I chatted with Jason's dad when he was young. He was about 35, had a beard and was wearing soft, floppy 1970s clothes. I think I was in the 1970s too. We talked about the stuff he's interested in: consciousness, altered states, adventures. I had the impression that, although he was a nerdy, scholarly type, he could relate to anyone -- the establishment and the counter culture of the time.

A dirty dream...

I had a dirty dream. I can't write about it here, you know, because it's private.

Writing a dirt clump and telephone essay

I was writing an essay in front of my professor, who was a kind of Boris Ustinov character. The essay was about how war is a class struggle against the poor, the solder being the victim. Suddenly I was using organic matter to create my words on a big sheet of paper. I knew what I was writing, but I was using green and brown pieces of dirt and plants as my letters. When I was done and ready to hand it in, the essay turned into a black telephone with little words all over it, like an art project. Suddenly what I was doing made sense. My professor seemed pleased.

The birthday bottle: vielles vignes 2004

And I thought that Anjou was a suburb in Montreal. Apparently not, as it seems to be a place in France where they make wine. And so, on the coldest night of the year, we cracked open the birthday wine Chateau de Fesles, Anjou, Vielles Vignes 2004. Hmmm... kind of dainty. Not knowing what to expect from this wine, maybe we're not subtle enough to get it. Maybe we're too used to big, bold South American wines. It was good, but it didn't blow me out of the water.

Burning Man dream, variation #184

I had another of my recurring Burning Man dreams. In this one, we were there with a ragtag bunch of old friends, strangers and family. None of whom seemed to know anything about where they were. We were setting up camp, and it became apparent that members of my family didn't bring any food or water, because they thought they could buy it on the playa. So I found a car and took one of them to a store, which turned out to be huge and rambling. I wandered off in one direction, he in another. Then I lost him in the store.

Ahhhhhh.... Errazuriz

We slummed it a bit with this wine... and she didn't deserve it. We guzzled her on the couch, with pizza. And for that I apologize, because she was oh so sweet and fresh... like the almost spring feeling right around the corner. Shiraz, 2005, Chile: Errazuriz Estate.

The first dream...

it was supposed to be proof of levitation, but i could see that the man was being held up by people holding sticks. set in india, a hippie was going into trance and started to levitate. he was naked and as he started to rise in the air, i could see that he had female genitalia. the lips of the vagina were singing and chanting. i woke up.

The first wine...

A delicious little red, with hints of blackberry and a hammer after 5 glasses. Shiraz, 2005, Chile: Errazuriz Estate.