This video is making me tear up...

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

And it's not just because of the song - though I am loving the song.

Not quite pudding

One of the major (MAJOR) differences between Emily and me is our patience levels. I need to be changing or disturbing things, coming or going, or messing around with things. Em, on the other hand, is quite happy to just sit with a rice pudding and let it become.

Over the weekend we made rice pudding from a semi-recipe we found at Rosy Little Things ("that's a recipe," said Em, "all of it?". It went smoothly with white rice and cardamom that she ground herself in a tiny mortar and pestle (and the only question would be: why don't *you* own one?), and it was good. And lo, we said, we shall make this again with the remaining half-a-can o'condensed milk. And so the rice was soaked, and the ingredients were joined and ne'er did I poke my head in the kitchen to see what was happening. And maybe an hour of quiet simmering later, we determined that into this short grain white rice recipe, there was long grain brown.

Emily had patiently followed the directions, had sat stirring over a vat of...well, can pudding be crunchy? The rice was not cooked, the pudding did not pud. We tried to eat it, much as we had loved the first batch, but it was not to be. Nevertheless we maintain hope, and plans for more - because you cannot, cannot have too much rice pudding.

The magic of Emily, though, is that I believe she convinced the sugar to caramelize. I kind of want to get more cans of condensed milk and see if she secretly knows how to make dulce de leche - I don't think she'll want to as she sometimes objects to snooty (french-named) foods on principle, but I can always tell her it's for more pudding (and then point out that she's been eating bastard-ish kheer).

It's like Venice...Italy...and California...but not...

We have a new mandate, Emily and I, to seek adventures of a Sunday, rather than, well, not. And so we plugged in Daisy, the trusty if sometimes a little addled GPS, and headed...well...somewhere! In this case, the "somewhere" that I plugged in was New Westminster - Quayside it said. I was thinking I would get to see the lovely public market there, but instead we found, well, we found these:

It's mid-February and little green things are beginning. Ah, yes, *that's* why I'm here. And we found:

We stumbled onto a boardwalk along the Fraser river, and found this weird wannabe Venice, Italy - fountains and reservoirs and even somewhere a classical-type statue (I did not take a picture of the statue because it mostly made me sad). It scared Em, but I rather enjoyed it. But we said goodbye to wannabe Italy and went back to the boardwalk (which wanted to be Venice Beach, CA) and found this:

Train tracks leading to nowhere, or to barges, but we don't think they're working anymore. And then, most wonderful, we found this!:

and Em got to climb. I got to take pictures of Em climbing (because it is a joy to watch). And I found pinecones (the good kind) and brought some home. It was nice to find all this about 20 minutes from home (by car!)