I got my Class 7N driver's licence today, and we'd recently taken a bag of empty milk cartons to the return-it depot, so I am officially 2/3 done my new year's resolutions. Now to get physio on my knee...

Made a basset hound for one of Lil' Dude's preschool friends who's having a birthday party tomorrow. Once again, the pattern is by the imitable June Gilbank.

It's really too bad we'll never hear Freddie Mercury sing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

The switch to daylight savings time is fucking wreaking havoc with my sleep.

Received four out of the five GST/HST returns for CUPJ, and the last is a nil remittance. I think I can now safely deregister the business number with no fear of an audit. Well, less fear of an audit.

Now to persuade bat-shit-crazy former editor to relinquish signing authority to the bank account...

(Why the fuck am I still dealing with this shit?)

Today was the first time I actually used the second-hand PC laptop I had to buy for my NRC gig, and I already got the blue screen of death.

Does the NRC Research Press really expect me to buy the Canadian Metric Practice Guide for $100 and  Scientific Style and Format for another $140? And why the hell is its main style guide something (Words into Type) that hasn't been updated since 1974?

Last Friday, while chopping onions, I lopped the tip of my left thumb off. I bled like a stuck pig, but I put gauze on it right away, put pressure on it, and elevated it. Trouble was, the Internet told me I had to change the dressing every twelve hours, and every time I lifted that last layer of gauze, I started to bleed again. So that sucked.

Meanwhile, Lil' Dude was sick with something or other and was just unbearable. I literally had to wear ear plugs one evening, because the incessant whining was getting to me. My sweetie caught that something or other and rolled around in bed, trying his best to help look after Lil' Dude while I was slammed with catching up on my work but generally being miserable. I thought I'd also caught whatever disease they had—some sort of awful head cold—on Saturday, but I seem to have escaped the worst of it, anyway. On Sunday, my sweetie had recovered enough to take Lil' Dude out for a day on the down while I worked. They went to the kids' ball room at Lonsdale Quay, where Lil' Dude licked one of the balls.

Sure enough, yesterday he woke up violently, vomitously ill. Screamed and puked every half hour. I had to cancel on AW (I was going to look after Joël so that she could go to SW's PhD defence), yet I somehow had to get to Lil' Dude's preschool as it let out so that I could give little Reika her gift before she moved away. (Her mom had given me a ball of yarn, so I made Reika a marmot with an adorable scarf.) He seemed to recover in the afternoon, demanding food, but by evening, he was making a mess everywhere again. Given that this bug seems to have an incubation period of two days, it may be my turn tomorrow to be hunched over the toilet.

So yeah. I am having a great week.

So on Monday I received refunds from CRA for two of the five GST/HST returns I filed on behalf of the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Journal a month ago. I've yet to hear back about the other three, so there's still a chance I'll get audited.

Fuck, am I ever champing at the bit to get this number deregistered so this bullshit never happens to me again...

Lil' Dude's at the age where he's insisting on doing everything himself but really sucks at it.

AW and I went to a terrific chocolate workshop yesterday at CocoaNymph. We got a lesson about the origins and history of chocolate and then got to make our own truffles:

(A good portion of them had already been consumed when I took this photo.)

Most chocolate we eat is made from a blend of beans around the world. We got to do a tasting of four types of single-origin chocolate. The one from Mexico was 66% cocoa, and it was a bit more acidic than the rest. I found it bright, with a deep, wine-like flavour. It was my favourite. The one from the Dominican Republic (70% cocoa) tasted a bit lighter. The one from Cuba (70%) was quick to melt, indicating that it has a higher proportion of cocoa butter to solids, whereas the last one, from Tanzania (75%) melted the slowest, indicating a higher proportion of solids. That one was AW's favourite.

Some other stuff I learned:
•You can learn how to be a chocolatier through an online school called École Chocolat.
•Cacao trees are understorey trees that grow usually within 10 degrees of the equator, although there is one specimen at the Vancouver Aquarium.
•The pods grow on the trunk of the tree. The pods are full of cacao beans that are surrounded by fruit—said to taste like nectarines or melon. The beans have a bitter husk like peanuts do.
•Once the pods are harvested (usually by machete—and the harvester has to be careful not to cut too close to the tree; otherwise the fruit will not grow back from that place again), the beans are fermented for a week, then dried and packed to receiving houses.
•The beans are roasted twice; the first is a flash roast at high temperature. This kills all the pathogens, after which cacao beans are among the most food-safe foods in the world. The second roast develops flavour (much like roasting coffee).
•Beans then go through winnowing, to remove the bitter skin. The beans are crushed into nibs for refining. (We got to taste nibs, too. AW thought they were too bitter, but I liked their nuttiness.)
•If the beans are processed by hydraulic press, the cocoa butter can be separated from the cocoa powder. The former is used to make chocolate, of course, but also can be sold to make cosmetics, etc. You can tell cheap chocolate is cheap if you read on the list of ingredients that they've used vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter.
•The separation allows for control in chocolate making—being able to vary the proportion of cocoa butter to solids for flavour and effect.
• Rodolphe Lindt developed conching, which releases the bitter essences from the chocolate. Too much conching, however, diminishes the chocolate's desirable flavours as well.
•Chocolate then has to be tempered—the process of inducing crystals to allow it to set and give the chocolate structure.
•Chocolate originated in Central America, where ancient civilizations drank it as a hot drink. Archaeological evidence shows that chocolate has been consumed since at least 1950 BCE. Hernan Cortes popularized the drink back in Spain, which was used like an energy drink to get people through Mass. It spread through Europe through the church.
•Sugar was first added in Oaxaca, where nuns wanted to encourage consumption of the sweet chocolate beverage as opposed to alcohol.
•Once Europeans found that chocolate was big business, they introduced cacao plantations in their tropical colonies.
•Milton Hershey figured out how to make milk chocolate (by adding dry milk powder, as water and chocolate don't mix). Only in 1849 was a bar of chocolate as we know it (sort of) available to the public for the first time, at a trade fair.


So yeah. We each got our own slab of ganache (three parts chocolate to two parts heavy cream), from which we cut out shapes with cutters or rolled balls with our hands. Then we threw each piece into the melted chocolate, coated it, and fished it out with a truffle fork. The trick is to tap the bottom of the fork on the chocolate surface a few times to draw off the excess chocolate. Then we put each piece on parchment paper and decorated it. We got a choice of four toppings: cocoa powder, chocolate sprinkles, strawberry curls, or cocoa nibs. We also got to play around with contact sheets, which have designs printed in coloured chocolate on plastic. You place the sheet, chocolate-side down, on the just-dipped truffle, and then, once it sets, you peel it off, leaving your design on the top.

We started off with high-quality ingredients, so the end product is incredibly tasty. I can't believe we only paid $30 for the workshop, including the chocolates (it was a Groupon). It was a lot of fun and beyond worth it.

DL and LB received the housewarming amigurumi I sent to New York!

Patterns by LucyRavenscar

Was one of eight people doing a usability study on a website being developed about child safety in the home. Compensation: $25 gift card.

Honestly, the website's going to need a huge structural overhaul. Nobody is going to visit a website just for a bunch of randomized safety tips. The project seems to be the product of insular researchers who don't really have a good grip on professional content generation and web design. The site didn't even have a search bar. A search bar! The content was pretty much begging to be a wiki, but it's not structured that way, and there's no meaningful way to retrieve information.

Anyway, I'm glad that I was able to contribute my opinions, though I wonder how many of my suggestions will be implemented. They hope to launch in the summer, and I think they have a long way to go.

I wish they'd pay me to edit and restructure the damn thing. Why am I not a billionaire?

Holy crap. I totally called Sam Gagner's eight-point night.

Too bad I hadn't wagered anything on it.

Did this forty-five-minute study, an online survey about attitudes and anxieties about health. Compensation: $5 Starbucks card.

Okay, this is hilarious. And yet there are no issues with Jack Black and Kyle Gas shown masturbating to the same song.

Lil' Dude learned about brontosaurus yesterday at preschool. What do I do? "Uh, I don't want to make a big deal out of this or anything, but you taught my kid something that's been out of date for almost forty years. It's called apatosaurus. Dumbass."

Need to catch up a bit. Here are some dinosaurs I made for K&Z:

Since we've seen a similar stegosaurus before, here's a closeup of the brachiosaurus:

And here's the marmot I made for S&S's brand-new baby, Erik:

All of these were made with patterns by June Gilbank.

Tim Tebow is proof that God is a dude. Not just a man, but a beer-swillin', belchin', sports-watchin' bro. "A famine in Somalia? Fuck that! Gonna watch me some FOOTBALL!"

Just back from taking Lil' Dude to SFU for a study where he got to play video games to assess how kids  with and without autism perform executive function tasks, executive functions being "capacities that allow us to accurately evaluate a situation and develop an appropriate response set. This may involve self-awareness, monitoring and planning, as well as organization, flexibility, inhibition, and working memory." He seemed to be into it (I was filling out surveys while he was doing most of it, so I didn't actually observe him) until he wanted a break and asked me to come into the room, at which point he kind of decided he was done. Hope he still gave the grad student some usable data, anyway. The compensation: a $20 gift card for Chapters.