What's in a name?

If you had asked me a week ago how I felt about taking my husband's name after marriage, I would have replied that I didn't much care one way or the other, but that he did so I would take his name. Then my dad asked me to take a hyphenated name so that I could keep my maiden name as part of my legal name. He was asking this because he was updating his will and he didn't want there to be any complications due to my name change when it comes time for the will to matter. All of a sudden, I realized that I do care. I've really grown attached to this Broccoli thing, and I certainly didn't want a hyphenated name at all. Plus, I have to think of the kids growing up with either a hyphenated name or a different name from their mother, both of which can cause confusion. Mr. Broccoli, of course, said it was entirely my decision to make (although he did really like the Broccoli thing, as well). What to do?

I spoke with a co-worker who got married 5 years ago, and she gave me the perfect answer that makes everybody happy. She said that legally changing your name is a long and pricey process and that nowadays, most women don't do it at all. Instead, the "assume" their husband's last name. This means that once I have a marriage license I can legally have all my IDs, credit cards, bank accounts, passport etc changed over to my new name without actually having it legally changed. I will still legally have my maiden name and I will still legally take on my husband's. Hurray for answers that keep me from having to make a decision!

In other news, I went home to Nova Scotia a few weeks ago for my bridal shower. It was a nice, relaxed, intimate affair in the living room of a waterfront house my parents own and rent out in the tourist season. My mom and grandmother catered it themselves and we used it as a chance to try out some wines for the reception dinner (I loved the red, an Italian called Masi. Still looking for a good white, though).

It was mostly my mother's friends, but they are all women that I've grown up with so I didn't feel out of place. Both my grandmother's were there, of course, as well as my cousin's wife and their oldest daughter who I hadn't seen since she was 7. She's 13 now. I'm sorry, but I don't remember ever giving her permission to grow up. She's supposed to stay little and cute like when I used to babysit her! There was also the daughter of one of my mother's best friends, another former babysitting charge. I hadn't seen her since she was about 13 and I was 18. The first thing she said when she saw me was, "Oh my God! You're so old! I can't believe you're getting married!". I'm so old?! Is that any way to talk to her venerable elder? :)

Here are the few pictures my mom took with my new camera:



Me, surrounded by my booty! Oh, and the guests, too.

A crowd shot.

I really think that paper plate hats covered in gift ribbons and bows will be really in this summer. Watch for it. My little cousin made this for me and did a wonderful job.




The spread. Yum

The all-important cake. This was baked by an old friend of mine from high school. My mom ran into her a few days before the shower and found that she's starting a home baking business. I had just picked my wedding colours the day before, that beautiful Autumn orange and my favourite colour, dark green, and it's great how she was able to incorporate that into the cake decoration.

Preparing the cake from group consumption (aka cutting the cake).

Wedding update

This whole wedding thing is really coming together. We've booked a hall for the reception in Toronto; we're having it at the Gladstone. I was there in university and it was a real dive at the time, but they've fixed it up and it's exactly what we're looking for. Since the Mosque ceremony will be family only, this reception is for our friends so we're planing to have it like a cocktail party with a very casual feel. The Gladstone is booked for the entire month of October except for the one date that we needed it! It was fated.

Yesterday, Mr. Broccoli's mother and sister took me shopping for an Indian wedding dress. The shop we went to did more casual wear than wedding dresses, but it was kind of nice to only have to try on a few dresses instead of dozens. The first one I tried on was a champagne coloured dress that had caught my future MIL's eye in the first place:



It's quite nice, but as you can see it quite washes me out. Remarks were made about my need for a tan, but that's what I expect being the only white girl in an Indian dress shop. :) Here's a close up view of the lovely needlework on the blouse.


See, not quite to washed out close up, but still...

Then she saleswoman brought out a purple dress.


A little colour makes a big difference, doesn't it? This one was also lovely, but not quite it, either (sorry for the blurry picture. It was taken on a blackberry).

When the saleswoman had first brought out a pink dress, I said right away that I wouldn't even try it on. Although my mom (among others) has always told me how good I look in pink, it's just not a colour that I picture myself in. After I tried on the purple dress she found another pink one of a different shade, so I consented to try it on.


And that was it. Even other shoppers in the store were coming over and saying "wow". The longer I had it on the more I liked it. We decided that this was the one.


Again, sorry for the blurry pic.

Of course, we had to find accessories.


I'm totally blinged out! The necklace is so large that it extends beyond the lower edge of the picture. It was hard to get the forehead piece to stay (I don't know what it's called). I'll have to pin the chain in securely for the wedding.

Here I am, the total outfit.

We still have to get shoes, bangles and a hijab and the dress needs a fair bit of tailoring to fit (outfits at this kind of store are all one size and it's up to the wearer to have it fitted) and to lengthen the sleeves. I really wanted something that was very different from the wedding dress I'll be wearing at the church wedding, and this is definitely it!

When we got back into the car, I found that the metalic embroidery had left scratches all over my arms! The things we women do for beauty.

Seeing green

Spring is looking like it might actually be a reality, despite sudden swings between 14 degrees and 10 below these last few weeks. All in all, I remain hopefuly that the Earth will continue on its usual orbit and that the weather will become consistently warm once more. With that in mind, 2 weeks ago I planted my first tomato seeds.

I made a self-watering seed starter out of a Tim Hortons water bottle from my lunch. I started out by cutting it into two at around the place where the bottle becomes ribbed (for her pleasure? I highly doubt it). The plastic bottle cap was thin enough that I was able to poke a hole in it using a metal poker that I have. I think the original purpose has something to do with tying up meat with string, but I bought them in university when I used to have an annual egg dying party for Easter. They're great for poking holes in the shells to get the insides out!

I got some cotton yarn from my yarn closet and cut off about 6 inches. I inserted it through the hole and tied a knot on the inside of the cap.

I filled the bottom with water and the top with potting soil (my potting soil from last year had completely dried out and it was quite an ordeal to re-introduce moisture into the soil). I made sure to keep the yarn as centered in the soil as possible. Then I placed the soil-filled top with the cap facing down into the water-filled bottom. Now the cotton yarn becomes a wick! I've barely touched it for the whole 2 weeks and I've certainly never watered it. Yet the soil is as moist as it was when I first planted it.

Somebody please think of the bees!

I love bees, I always have. I love their shape, I love their colours, I love their fuzzy little bodies, I love that my name starts with "B", and I especially love their honey (I really love honey!). But I have come across some startling news. Apparently, the honey bee population in North America is dwindling! Yee gads! I first heard about this on Planet Green, the sister site of TreeHugger.com. Apparently Haagen Dazs is trying to bring awareness to this issue with a website and by promising to donate part of the proceeds from the sale of their "bee-dependent" ice cream flavours, including a brand new flavour called Vanilla Honey Bee. Yum. I hardly need an excuse to eat high quality ice cream, especially with spring (supposedly) upon us and summer round the bend.

You may be thinking, "why would I care if the bees all die? I don't like honey, all bees do is make honey and sting people". Well there, fussy britches. Don't write off bees so fast. Making honey is the most obvious thing that bees do for people, but it's far from the most important. Bees are pollinators, so along with birds and bats bees are responsible for fertilizing 1/3 of all of our agriculture. Every third bite you take of a peach this summer is thanks to the work of bees. So raise your spoons high and dig in for the bees!

Hey, where'd that sun go?

Despite the imminent snow forecasted for today and tomorrow, we' had yet another lovely weekend. I think, if we have to keep see-sawing between winter and spring weather, I like our current mix of cold, bitter weekdays (when I'm stuck in my window-less office) and warm, sunny weekends when I can go out and play. With the previous weekend being a long weekend, the weather gods decided to take that into consideration and gave us a lovely Friday, too!

On Friday Mr. Broccoli and I went to mosque with his family. There isn't really an equivelent to East in Islam, but because everyone gets the day off it tends to be one of the days when everyone goes to Friday service. We didn't balance this off by attending church on Sunday, but when we have kids that will definitely be the rule. Before mosque we spent about an hour and his parents' house so that I could go through the picture boxes with Mr. Broccoli's mother. My mom wants to do a slideshow during the reception and has asked for pictures of my sweetie growing up. I ended up taking all the boxes and albums home and I will hve a phone conference with my mom sometime this weekend to decide which ones she wants.

The rest of the weekend was taking up with my fierce and sudden urge to nest. All I wanted to do was spring cleaning, so I did several loads of laundry, some organizing of my craft studio, and some baking. I'd like to get into the habit of baking every weekend. I made some crepe batter, which I promptly forgot about in the fridge, and pie crust dough. The crepe batter will keep for a few more days, so I'll need to make the crepes some weeknight this week. Ihope to keep a batch of cooked crepes in the fridge for quick breakfasts.

The pie crust was an experiment of sorts. I took the recipe from a 1970s book about cooking food for the freezer. I got it at a church sale and I love how it refers to freezers as brand new technology and even has a chapter on why you would want to bother buying one. I substitued whole wheat flour for white in the hopes of making it more nutricious (Mr. Broccoli is trying to lose weight), but it turns out the whole wheat flour isn't as easy to work with. It took more water than the recipe called for to make it ball up without crumbling in my hands (and I still didn't quite overcome this) and it baked into a much denser crust. I wanted to make little mini pie crusts to use some of my homemade caramel apple jam as filling, but the only circular cookie cutter I had was smaller than the tart molds so I ended up with all kinds of little slightly curved disks of whole wheat crust. Hmmm, not quite what I was going for. Next time, I'll use white flour so I can get a sense of what it's supposed to come out like and then maybe experiment with substituting part amounts of whole wheat flour. I'll also need to get a larger circlular cutter of some sort. Maybe an aluminum can. I'm still eating the little disks with apple jam for breakfast.

Pi is round

Happy Pi Day everyone! Today is March 14 or 3.14. Get it? :)

Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts who, we all know, are renowned for their geeky sense of humour. I love the idea. If it weren't for the fact that Mr. Broccoli and I had already decided to make soup tonight (sweet potato and corn soup with organic whole grain bread fried in olive oil and spices; yum!) I would make some kind of meat pie. Maybe I'll make mini pies with my homemade apple jam for dessert. Anyway, everyone get your geek on and let me know what you did to celebrate the great infinite number.

Also, I got a raise today! Inching ever forward in my effort to pay off my student loan. Hurray!

Plants on the brain

Despite the serious dumping of snow we received this past weekend, I'm already starting to feel the coming of spring. For example, last night it was 9:30 before I noticed that I hadn't turned the heat back up to 70F when I got home from work (I always turn it down to 65 before I leave for work). I eventually turned it up so that I wouldn't freeze in bed: Queen sized bed + 1 person sleeping alone = cold nights. I can stand waiting for the bus in the morning without loosing feeling in my smaller appendages and walking from a warm doorway to a cold car seems like less of an Arctic expedition. All in all, the warm weather is coming.

With the tiny but noticeable changes in the weather, my thoughts inevitably turn to my annual attempts to maintain a garden that doesn't shrivel up and die by mid-June. I've decided to keep it simple this year by starting out with only one crop: tomatoes. I'm not a huge fan of eating tomatoes by themselves, but I do like a lot of things that tomatoes go into, like beef stew that uses tomato paste, spaghetti sauce, and, of course, ketchup. Plus, back when I actually had a back yard, tomatoes were always the vegetable that managed to grow, even when we had a drought and all other plants had scummed.

I've isolated that my main obstacle to green-thumbed success is my inability to regularly water the outdoor plants during the peak of the summer when my job is at its busiest and I'm at my most stressed-out. Of course, that is the time of year when they most need regular watering, especially since my balcony is South-facing, so this usually ends in disaster. To prevent that from happening this year I'm currently devising a self-watering plant container out of plastic popcorn buckets from the movie theatre (Mr. Broccoli has a serious thing for popcorn and a large bucket of the stuff - covered in powdered flavoring - is considered a requirement for any movie outing, so we have about a dozen). I'll post pictures of the construction when I can realistically start to make it (i.e. when there's no more snow on the balcony). Until then, viva spring!

Edited to add: I've found a few Instructables on how to make self-watering planters. I plan to use bits and pieces from each one. There are two methods of using a plastic bottle or milk jug that would be a great seed starter or herb container, there's a much larger one for multiple plants using a Rubbermade container. Apparently you can buy premade planters call Earth Boxes that are self-watering, but there is always someone out there who wants to try and make it themselves. This is closer to what I have in mind with the popcorn buckets. Here's a good one on general organic gardening. It's meant for large-space in the ground gardening, but there are some good resources. This is a great one for adding a self-watering bottle into a unmodified planter. (These links are for anyone interested in this DIY project, as well as for myself to get back to later.)