This morning I changed my life. I became an official member of the BC Liberal Party. Here is the lovely email i received from BCLP:
Thank you for your support of the BC Liberal Party. You will receive an official membership card in the mail shortly. You have registered 1 member(s): MICHELLE LITTLE.. blah blah blah. they mentioned that i registered to late to vote in the upcoming election and other junk but i didn't really read it all.
What finally prompted me to jump into the political scene you may wonder. Well I decided it was time that my opinion, my vote, was heard! that is my official line. did you like it?
let's get a bit more real. I was prompted to join so that i could attend a convention with a friend of mine. After realizing the process involved a simple online form and a five dollar fee, i acquiesced. convention is basically a party for old people right? since I'm practically old, i have decided to join the convention-going folk. Here's how my conversation went with Jess:
Me: so do i get anything fun out of this membership?
Her: haha umm not really... well now you can attend all the events with me..usually free food...sometimes free booze. flirt with politicians...haha.
So that's that. I am now a Liberal. I think that means I can stop shaving my legs and that I am officially pro-choice. Yay me! You're totally jealous right? Feel free to join Join the BC Liberal Party Online
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Twin and I baked chocolate sugar cookies yesterday. We whipped up some homemade icing and then poisoned it with strawberry flavoring. I kid you not. This flavoring tastes like poison. We added extra ingredients to try to cover the poison taste and were only mildly successful. After doing a dozen or so we ended up tossing most of the icing and leaving the cookies sadly undecorated. During the icing fiasco Manda looks over to me and says, "Why does everything we make together turn out so awful? Is it because we have too much fun?" I agreed that I thought it was that our fun levels rise to high during the baking process. Things seem to go awry every time, but at which point I can not say. We decided a baking course needs to be in our future. Literally, two minutes later she looks over at me and her teeth are stained bright pink! She must have been eating icing. She rinses out her mouth and smiles and asks if it's gone, but her mouth is still fluorescent pink. So hilarious. She sprinted for the bathroom and her toothbrush while I giggled in the kitchen (after checking my teeth to make sure that the evidence of my 'tasting' hadn't stained my teeth).
Triple layer chocolate birthday cake. some people think baking a cake is just opening the box and adding water, oil and eggs. those people are wise. unfortunately i am not one of those people. i have this notion stuck in my head that i can do it better than a box. Box cake mix has scientists and world class bakers and preservatives on its side. i, on the other hand, have Watson. The only thing she adds to my baking is cat hair.
The fact that the cake was a birthday cake meant a whole birthday could be ruined if this cake didn't turn out. with that weight on my shoulders I began to research. I found the best chocolate cake recipe and accompanying icing. i looked up techniques for cake trimming, layering and splitting. I learned that applying a simple syrup (reduced sugar water basically) keeps the cake moist. I learned to take stock of my tools before beginning such an important task as you can't bake a round layered cake in a square dish- duh. Over the course of my two bake days i also re-learned as i seem to do time and time again to read the recipe in its entirety before starting anything and that not doing this means you are an idiot. It also means you will have to mix twice as long and hard if you add all the dry ingredients instead of alternate between dry and wet. It wouldn't be such a big deal if i had a hand mixer, but unfortunately that was ruined by a baking incident months ago. Manda's sweater and the hand mixer got in a fight and her sweater won. The cake layering process was as annoying as i knew it would be. the cake crumbling as i was trying to ice it. WHY?! i shouted at my cake. so annoying. i finally got it all slathered with a few rough spots. I decided to not decorate it as we were going to go candle crazy instead. We threw a cute little 25 on there and this little singing flashing happy birthday sign. Saturday night we turned off the lights and seven of us (all musically un-inclined) belted out the happy birthday song to Sam. we ate cake (that tasted as good as box cake) with strawberries while drinking boxed wine. LML.
Maclean's magazine in digital format gets emailed to me every week- I don't always read them, mostly I just skim the headlines and look at the pretty pictures. Today i hit the jackpot- and I'm talking a dollar machine max bet jackpot. I was skimming along, about to close the ezine and move to something less Macleansy when i realized i had landed on something that might actually be readable. The headline wasn't very catchy "getting a jump on things", even the picture wasn't THAT cool, but something had piqued my interest so i decided to read anyways. The sub heading read "hopping from rooftops, scaling walls and fences- it's all part of the ever growing popularity of parkour". When i got to the part where the article mentioned that parkour is a global phenomenon with practitioners in every major Canadian City I abandoned the article and hit up google. My search for "Vancouver Parkour" produced this video:
So obviously I'm now totally sold on the idea of parkour. I imagine you are too. Maybe not, maybe you think it's stupid, but that would be wrong and you should probably jump on the bandwagon. I don't think it's necessarily an activity meant for me personally, but the idea of being a fan of parkour appeals to me. Let's see what wikipedia has to say:
Parkour (sometimes abbreviated to PK) is a utilitarian discipline based upon the successful, swift and energy-efficient traversing of one's surrounding environment via the practical application of techniques, based around the concept of self-preservation and the ability to help others. It is a non-competitive, physical discipline of French origin in which participants run along a route, attempting to negotiate obstacles in the most efficient way possible, using only their bodies. Skills such as jumping, climbing, vaulting, rolling, swinging and wall scaling are employed. Parkour can be practiced anywhere, but areas dense with obstacles are preferable, and it is most commonly practiced in urban areas. The usage and employment of flips into the named route does not constitute parkour.
A practitioner of parkour is called a traceur, which is most likely derived from Parisian slang tracer which means "to hurry" or "to move quickly".
Two primary characteristics of parkour are efficiency and speed. Traceurs take the most direct path through an obstacle as rapidly as that route can be traversed safely. Developing one's level of spatial awareness is often used to aid development in these areas. Also, efficiency involves avoiding injuries, both short and long term. This idea embodying parkour's unofficial motto is être et durer ("to be and to last").
Still not sold yet? I guess i gotta bring out the big guns. Let me share my most awesome PK research find, a clip from The Office:
