top ten signs that it might possibly almost be spring in thunder bay

i don't want to jinx anything you guys, cause we might get 15 inches of snow this weekend (btw, environment canada says on friday it's going to be +3 and rain, but on saturday it's going to be +6 and snow. how does that work again?) but there are a few signs, around our house anyway, that spring might actually be coming this year (and believe me, there were times that i thought maybe this was it, the never ending winter. but that could just be because i'm re-reading a game of thrones and feeling particularly apocalyptic). but, take note:

1. in the morning, my car starts on the first try
2. i no longer hear the sound of snowmobiles ripping up and down the trails late into the night
3. when we came back from walking in the woods the other day, riley's fur was covered in mud instead of ice balls
4. the thought of leaving the house at night does not make me want to cry
5. the windows are open and i'm not about to die of hypothermia
6. i can see all the pine cones on our front lawn that i didn't pick up last fall
7. i no longer crave beef stew and macaroni and cheese (okay, fine. maybe macaroni and cheese)
8. i've been wearing my new wedges around the house
9. i'm pretty sure someone had a bonfire the other day
10. people have started talking about gardens in casual conversation (not me, mind you. but people)

my top eight most nostalgic foods

so last night on top chef, they had the contestants cook something that represented their ancestry. they had genealogist come on and give them their family background, and then their actual family come on and talk about things they used to eat at family dinners and whatever.

so, i'm obviously never going to be on top chef but like always i started to panic thinking, holy crap, what could i possibly make for this challenge? what i was fed growing up was basically a combination of down on ye olde nova scotia farm and haute suburban freezer gastronomie which, the more i thought about it, is kind of awesome. i mean, imagine padma sitting down to a plate of jello-mayonnaise salad, trying not to gag when i started telling her all about how my great grandparents used to basically squirt milk straight from the cow onto their oatmeal.

don't throw up, padma. embrace your revulsion. it's part of the experience.

1. jello-mayonnaise salad - i had to get this one out of the way first, as i'm sure you all still have the image clearly embedded in your head (and maybe you always will. who knows). sorry mom, but everyone thinks this is GROSS. and for the record, i didn't think it was gross, when i was growing up--i just thought it was what everyone ate, cause i was a kid and I DIDN'T KNOW ANY BETTER. i mean, individually, all the ingredients were good. you've got your little iceberg lettuce leaf on the bottom, as a holder. fine. then you have a layer of jello, preferably strawberry--also fine, if not a little weird on a salad. then a healthy spoonful of cottage cheese, cause WE'RE TRYING TO BE HEALTHY HERE. and, on top of the cottage cheese, the crowning glory of this dish: a huge, wet, sloppy dollop of mayonnaise.
2. catalina dressing - when i was a kid, i thought catalina WAS dressing. you know, the way salt is salt or butter is butter. there were no different kinds of these things, they just were (although now my supermarket sells, like, twenty seven different kinds of salt, so maybe i was wrong about that, too). not only that, but there was also only one kind of green salad. it was iceberg lettuce, topped with tomatoes, celery, cucumber and maybe radishes. it was in a big wooden bowl with a big wooden fork and a big wooden spoon and you put it in a smaller wooden bowl, never on your plate. that was just how it went. and then one day we went out for dinner at hogie's (HOGIE'S? RIGHT, HALIFAX?) and instead of having chicken nuggets and fries or whatever i would usually have, i had a steak. and it came with a salad. and that salad came with MANDARINS ON THE SIDE. also, the waiter asked me what kind of dressing i wanted and i just kind of stared at him blankly. sort of like if i went to a restaurant now and they asked me what kind of salt i wanted. which might happen someday, you never know.
3. bologna - at our family meal table, a slice of bologna totally counted as the protein part of our meal. my favourite part of fried bologna, though, was how they turned into little hats in the frying pan. my second favourite part of fried bologna is that it TASTES TOTALLY GREAT! EXCELLENT!
   
   
    another taste of my childhood!
   i seriously can't tell you how excited i am to finally get to post this commercial on listophelia. now to just come up with a "top ten skin care products from my childhood" so i can post that oil of olay one with bugsy brown.
4. hodge podge - okay, this one is kind of cheating because when i was a kid, i HATED hodge podge. i mean, it was VEGETABLES, EW. but now, i love it, and i make it all the time, all the time being the five minutes of the year that i can get all the required baby veggies fresh from cory's dad's garden. that's because the secret of hodge podge (other than the butter and the cream, obviously) is that the veggies have to be either a) from your garden or b) someone else's garden. which means little baby carrots from the farm market are okay; little baby carrots in a bag from the grocery store are not. i also enjoy making hodge podge because if someone's like "what the hell's hodge podge?" i can say "don't worry, it's a maritime thing, you wouldn't understand." sort of like blueberry grunt or greco pizza or bruce frisko's hair.
5. mussels - so you might be saying to yourself "whatever, amy, mussels aren't unusual or gross in any way, what's the deal, anyway" and to that i say "haha, you don't know my family. we can make even the most normal things weird." example: have you ever heard of something called red tide? it's an algae that can cause something called paralytic shellfish poisoning, and was the reason that the shellfish harvest was closed from june to september in st. margaret's bay. BUT WHAT DID WE CARE ABOUT PARALYTIC SHELLFISH POISONING, YOU GUYS? we happily ate mussels harvested from our beach all summer long. we cooked them in a giant pot, spread out newspapers over everything, and drowned them with butter, and us kids would try to see who could collect the most pearls (mostly by cajoling the adults who broke their teeth on them to give them to us). maybe we were too busy with those to notice the "numbness or tingling in lips and tongue, which spreads to the fingers and toes, followed by a loss of muscular co-ordination and the inability to breathe" which the dfo tells me we may have experienced. PFFT.
6. mom's spaghetti - everyone loves their mom's spaghetti, even when they're, like, vomiting it up before big rap battles or whatever. but you guys, you have not tried my mom's spaghetti. the first three ingredients in her sauce are KETCHUP, BROWN SUGAR AND WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE. if you think this sounds more like barbecue sauce, you are right. it tastes exactly like barbecue sauce, with green peppers and mushrooms in it. slop it over some white spaghetti with a few meatballs and parmesan cheese (the kraft kind in the plastic jar, or "shakey cheese" as we called it) and you have my favourite childhood meal. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE the first time i had spaghetti at a friend's house. i thought i was on another planet.
7. swansen's tv dinners - when i was little, my mom was in and out of the hospital a lot (or maybe it was just once, but i remember it so well it was like it happened all the time). and i LOVED it when she would go. this might sound morbid and also evil, but it's not, you guys, because a) i didn't understand that the hospital was a bad place and b) my dad would look after us and he would feed us TV DINNERS! oh, you guys. i can still taste that soggy fried chicken, that weirdly smooth little triangle of fake potato with the little yellow streak of butter in it, the apple cobbler thing in the middle that we ALWAYS saved til the end, even though it was sitting in front of us the whole time.
   
   
   mmm, whipped potato
   
   they had foil on the top of them and you had to eat them in front of the tv on one of those little folding tables. it's funny--i don't remember my dad ever eating them with us. that's cause he probably would put us to bed and then go out for a steak.
8. angel cookies - so when i think of my nana, i think of a couple of things: a) her costume jewellery b) her awesome hats c) how she basically hated everyone, equally, except me and a couple of other people. oh, and d) angel cookies, which in my mind she made for me every day after school but really was probably just once and the rest was just at christmas or something. i don't even know if they really were angel cookies. i'm sure that's what she called them, even though the internet seems to think they're something different (mostly cookies shaped like angels, which let me tell you, these were not). they were pale and chewy and thin, so the edges would crisp up and be delicious, and she always put one chocolate chip right in the middle and they were so good and HOLY CRAP I NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE THESE RIGHT NOW. i'm sorry, this is going to have to be a top eight list, you guys. it's basically a matter of life and death.

top one awesome video of the day - st. paddy's day edition

1. my three favourite muppets ever, wearing berets!
   
   

nine things i love about short stories

you guys, it's the year of the short story! this is cause for celebration! so in honour of the launch of the yoss website, i am NOT writing the short story i should be writing, and instead writing this list. uh, go... me?

1. they're economical! just think: you're spending $20 bucks on a book, right? in these trying times, what's better bang for your buck, one story, or 10-15? it's not like you're going to get any less lost in any one of those 10-15 stories, but when you're done with one, HOLY CRAP, THERE'S ANOTHER! BEST DAY EVER!
2. the endings! remember when no country for old men and everyone was like "the ending sucks, you're going to hate the ending." then i watched it and when the end came i was basically jumping up and down with excitement, yelling "it's a short story ending! it's a short story ending!" to my movie-watching companion (and, fine, everyone else in the theatre). let's face it, short stories are always going to end before you want them to. if you're a writer of short stories, people are always going to say "i wanted to know what happened next!" when talking about your work. also, you might be writing a new story and suddenly be like "whoa. there's the end!" way before you thought the end was going to be. it's always a bit of a shock to end a short story, as a reader or a writer, but then you carry that shock with you for the rest of the day. you feel restless, unquieted, maybe even a little angry. you're fucking confused! and you don't want to admit it, but that's kind of the best feeling in the world. and hey, didn't no country for old men win a bunch of oscars? yeah, i thought so.
3. now that you mention it, the beginnings! i think of the beginning of a novel as slowly immersing yourself in a warm tub of water, whereas the beginning of a short story is like being thrown into a shark tank covered in fish guts. now that i read it over, it doesn't sound very appealing. but you have to admit, it's pretty damn exciting!
4. and also, the middles! in short stories, you can get away with completely batshit crazy transitions that you can't so much get away with in novels. like, one second you're in 1950s antarctica surrounded by penguins and the next you're in 2011 in a penthouse in new york, thinking about that one penguin who changed your life. IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH. well, why not? IT'S A SHORT STORY! now if you'll excuse me, i have to go write a story about two penguin researchers in love RIGHT NOW.
5. they're like the movie trailers of the literary world! it's no secret around listophelia that i love movie trailers. in fact, i usually like them better than the actual movie. there's even a show that we pvr every day called "nothing but trailers" which is basically my favourite show on television right now. so why do i love movie trailers so much? it's easy: cause they take all the best parts of the movie and condense them into three minutes of pure cinematic bliss set to a dramatic soundtrack. JUST LIKE A SHORT STORY. well, except for the dramatic soundtrack part, but i'm working on that. how many times have you heard someone say "the movie wasn't as good as i thought it was going to be. all the funny parts were in the trailer." EXACTLY.
6. they're like the box of truffles of the literary world! because i just wouldn't be me if i didn't make a food analogy, consider this: i used to say, all the time, that short story collections were like a box of truffles, cause you wouldn't want to just sit down and eat them all at once, you would want to savour them, one at a time, and the best way to really enjoy them would be to spread them out over time. but really, fuck that. who doesn't secretly want to sit down and devour a whole box of chocolates in one sitting? you? whatever, liar.
7. canadians are really, really good at them! let's take a look at my "to-read" list. the divinity gene by matthew "yoss-founder and man-about-toronto" trafford. the beggar's garden, by michael "screw you, vancouver, we're totally claiming him for thunder bay, just so you know" christie. got no secrets by danila "i can't believe i haven't read your book yet you halifax literary goddess" botha. better living through plastic explosives by zsuzsi "vancouver loves you even though googling your book title has put us all on the cia watch-list" gartner. not to mention my "just-read" list, too much happiness by alice "the godmother" munro. i made all those nicknames up, by the way. you're welcome!
8. other people think they don't like them! i'm a notorious rooter-for-the-underdog. when i hear someone say something like "i don't like short stories. you can't really love the characters or get into the story" it makes me want to say LIKE HELL YOU CAN'T and run off and find armloads of books (SEE ABOVE) that TOTALLY MAKE YOU LOVE THE CHARACTERS AND GET INTO THE STORY. and, in this short story fantasy of mine, that someone reads all those books and says "holy crap amy, you were right!" and then all those books go on to be bestsellers and the world throws me a ticker tape parade for showing them the light and i get to ride in the back of a convertible driven by zac galifianakis with the muppets, a non-concussed sidney crosby and the entire cast of 30 rock in the back with me and we're all wearing ballgowns and eating ice cream while "club can't handle me" plays over the loudspeakers and the whole world breaks out into a spontaneous dp. you know. dance party.
9. but other people want to like them! you guys, all of my staff picks at work have been short story collections--darwin's bastards, both ways is the only way i want it, no one belongs here more than you--and they have all SOLD OUT. my current pick, twilight of the superheroes, is on the verge of selling out. people WANT to love short stories, you guys! they just need a little push! year of the short story, FTW!

top one awesome video of the day

1. it is clearly some kind of ferris bueller week that i'm not aware of.
   
   

top one awesome video of the day

1. ferris bueller's day off as an indie coming-of-age flick:
   
   

top ten lists that went nowhere

o, readers. winter is doing me in. or something. i literally just asked twitter if it was illegal to go to bed at 8:30 on a saturday night. twitter replied that yes, indeed, it is illegal. it's not that i don't love you or that i'm seasonally affected or have a substance abuse problem or any of the other things that make people say things like o, readers, i am being done in. i'm likely vitamin d deficient, newly puppy-less, and have been working a lot and sometimes the sun peeks through the clouds and reminds me that i once wore shorts and went to bonfires. also this time of year, this weird thing happens where the pads of my fingers get really sore and sometimes split open (are they really called "pads"? i seriously hate that word). and my computer is sad, too; it keeps saying no! in the form of blue screen of death five times a day. it's just all very melancholy.

but it's okay, guys, don't worry about us, we are heading to duluth for three days to play on waterslides and eat at olive garden and make ourselves feel better. and we will come back and march will basically be half over! and maybe i can even wear my new shoes. in the meantime, here is all the lists that i considered making tonight but didn't. it's like a little catalogue of list fails.

1. something about how my blackberry is way cooler than cory's iphone. which obviously it isn't, but then, neither am i.
2. something about ghosts. i know i wrote about ghosts before, but i kind of got excited when i found a blackberry app that claimed to be able to detect supernatural activity. like a sucker i downloaded it, and it did nothing. maybe that's the point and it's some kind of ironic app. whatever. i like the idea of ghosts and i hope some day to be one.
3. top ten characters on television that i hate irrationally. there's really only one, and that's karen from the office. i hate her so much that my hatred has spilled over into rashida jones' characters on other shows, like anne perkins on parks and rec. and actually, rashida jones herself, who i think tonight i may have actually referred to as "bitchface slutbag" or something. even worse, cory even knew who i was talking about. it makes no sense, i know. i also really hate ellie from chuck, but only sort of. so that's really not much of a list.
4. top ten smells that you forget about for a long time and then you smell them again and they remind you of something awesome. this was completely inspired by going to buy ice cream one day and sticking my head in the ice cream freezer at the corner store and smelling that smell that ice cream freezers have, you know, that stale freezer smell mixed in with, well, ice cream. and all of a sudden i was ten and crawling halfway into the freezer to find that last damn squished-up creamsicle wedged somewhere in the bottom. but that was the only one that i could think of that might be kind of universal, the rest were all just "cory's deodorant" or "that coconut lime body wash that reminds me of duluth," none of which you need to hear about or care about. oh, and also that smell that the gap has everywhere you go. what is with that, anyway?
5. top ten hello kitty things around our house. okay, probably more like top twenty. but really, that involves a) finding my camera and b) getting up off the couch. not exactly the kind of thing i'm interested in doing right now.
6. something about amazing robots and shark attacks! you might wonder what these two things have in common. well, i'll tell you. they are both things i can build with these little kits i bought at work for two dollars a couple of weeks ago and have been intending to build ever since, but instead have just been sitting on top of our old television that had been sitting in our living room ever since we got our new television because it is too big to fit down the stairs to the basement and that we have been intending to take to cory's parents' but haven't.
7. things in our living room that we have been intending to do something with. i just thought of that one!
8. top ten songs about hockey. this would be a great list except hockey just makes me sad now. in fact, just typing the word hockey makes me sad. what makes me the most sad, though, is thinking back to the time when i was super excited about this season: sitting on the floor at cory's parents' in front of the tv, wearing my little penguins hat and booing alex ovechkin. poor sweet little innocent me. if only i had known.
9. top ten people twitter thinks i should follow who i either hate or are totally irrelevant to anything ever in life. here's why this list wouldn't work: i just logged onto twitter to try to find an example of this for you guys, and when i clicked on "suggestions" it said "sorry, we have nothing for you now!" like even twitter is like, meh, i'm tired, go away, i want to watch miley cyrus on snl.
10. i don't know, something about assassin's creed? just cause cory's playing it right now and it seems kind of crazy. like if i watch it too long it might give me vertigo. or make me throw up. also, there's all these buxom wenches everywhere, but I don't think you can sleep with them, like in mass effect. man. i should write video game reviews. i'm amazing! cory's analysis is better, though: "this game is scary! good thing there isn't any flying sharks!" clearly it's time to pack it in for the night.