Oh my god, it’s not even Halloween yet and my book has started to fill for dates for Christmas/holiday parties. HELP!!

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Christie’s halloween party

After months and months of waiting and preparation, Christie’s halloween party was last night. I ended up going as a vampire (you know how vampires look like normal people? they don’t go around wearing a cape… exactly!)

Eva was supergirl dressed as a pirate.

Here I am with Kat (the sweatpants fairy), Eva, Brett (Vanilla T) and Amber (Perez Hilton).

This guy was dressed as a sex machine.

Death was lurking around all night.

Here I am with our fabulous hostess, Pirate Christie!

Finally, I followed the instructions given in the invite and brought some donations for the Food Bank. No one else took it seriously, so no one brought anything. Now I provided Christie et al with lunch!

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The 80s Prom Party has been postponed

There were 18 votes. The majority were for postponing the party until February. So consider this your notice: Big, huge 80s prom party in February, yaaaaay!
Now I won’t have a birthday party 😦

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My 80s prom party

OK, here’s the deal. The party room in my condo is booked for November 17, the day when I wanted to have my party. So now I think I want to postpone my party until after Christmas. Probably around end of January or beginning of February. Actually, it will probably be after St. Valentine’s because my cousin Johnny is getting married in the beginning of February.
I was wondering if all my friends would be super disappointed if this happened. What do you guys think?

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Almost-vegan Thanksgiving dinner

Dinner
Originally uploaded by Maria in Toronto

As loyal readers know, it’s been discovered that the milk protein makes me really sick. So now I am on a restricted diet in which I can’t have any milk products including butter, cream and cheese. Thanksgiving is a difficult time since almost everything involves a ton of butter. We decided I would cook Thanksgiving dinner for us. I made a delicious vegan carrot soup with a hint of ginger and curry.
This is one of the most delicious soups I ever made.
First I chopped onion and garlic and fried it in olive oil, then I added the carrots and potatoes.Then I added two cups of vegetable bouillon, salt and pepper, one teaspoon curry powder and half a cup of chopped fresh ginger. I let it boil for about 30 minutes and then I pureed it in the blender. It was so delicious.
I also made an applesauce cranberry Jello (that’s the only non-vegan thing in the whole menu). I made my own applesauce, with no sugar added.
As a main dish I made baked butternut squash in cashew sauce. It was more difficult than I thought to chop the squash (it was really really difficult). It took about 45 minutes in the oven to be ready.

And as a side I made a “stuffing” with fried onions, garlic and celery and bread crumbs. I baked it for 20 minutes as a roast.
Our vegetarian almost vegan Thanksgiving menu was delicious, but it took so long to make that when I asked James what he was thankful for all he could come up with was “I am thankful that dinner is finally ready”. Hah!

The Fog!

This is the normal view from my living room window:

This is the view today at 6 PM, it is so foggy!

(sorry, there’s a building missing in the first picture, I just realized it’s an old-ish photo but it gives a good impression of THE FOG!)
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OCAD at Nuit Blanche

OCAD
Originally uploaded by Easternblot

I took a quick pottery lesson with Mark, the really cute teacher at OCAD. I made my very first cup/thumbler. Sadly it was so crappy that I couldn’t keep it, I also think it needed baking or something!

Nuit Blanche 2007

Throwing
Originally uploaded by Maria in Toronto

Eva was in charge of our Nuit Blanche route. She was great at organizing everything we needed and everything we wanted to see. Caroline and Erin came all the way to Toronto to join us for Nuit Blanche.
First stop: The Distillery District
Caroline was interested in the Raku Firing (which rhymes with raccoon fighting, I was excited about this, haha, I’m funny). We were too early for it, but she was able to throw some pottery. We also had coffee at Balzac’s and saw some dance performance and an artist doing the art per hour thingie (one piece of art per hour, all night).
Next stop: Dundas and McCaul
Then we went to Dundas, where a lot of the activity was happening. First we saw this heart-shaped video booth display (or something like that). I had no idea what it was, though it looked like Speakers’ Corner or something like that.

From there, we headed to Dan Falk’s really cool exhibit of pictures he took in Ireland.

And then to OCAD.

They were having a “throwing marathon”, which is not throwing stuff at people, but actually doing pottery. I took a quick class and did my very first pottery cup (sadly it was so crappy I didn’t get to keep it).

Outside OCAD we saw three video game machines.

And some silver corn.

Third stop: Parkdale
We waited on the corner of McCaul and Queen for about 25 minutes. Finally the streetcar came and it was super crowded. We jumped on it through the back door (we all had metropass or day pass anyway) and it took us about 45 minutes to make it all the way to Queen and Cowan. We got there for the 10:30 performance of Close Knit and I was excited to see some yarn on display (hah!)

A knitter and a violinist were together, I told Eva that it could totally have been me and her, except we were watching and not performing.

The walk to Trinity-Bellwoods
We stopped for a few beers at a party and then walked west on Queen. It was really cool, full of people, everyone having a good time, everyone on the street. It is cool to see everyone participating in this type of events.
A house was covered with quilt and crochet.

And we stopped on the corner of Queen and Ossington to look at these tubas. You were supposed to plug in your Ipod and listen to it through the tubas. We didn’t know and didn’t have our Ipods with us.

There were billboards and flyers for a quick lobotomy for $300. I called the number but I got a busy signal. Does anyone know who was picking up and what kind of lobotomy-type deal this was?

We made it to the exhibit where they were supposed to be filling a window with water and fish. It turned out to be a projection (boo!)

We finally made it to Trinity-Bellwoods park where Rannie was taking pictures. After that, Eva kept on going. I was glad to go to bed then, so we headed to King Palace restaurant for a late-night Pakistani dinner. Then we went home.