My Dad has taken Byron swimming up at UBC pool, and I’m supposed to be writing, but let me just take a few seconds here.  Fun is being had.  Blackberry picking, Science World, and several hardware stores yesterday; park and swimming today.

Oh, and three words: Star Wars Legos.  Grandpa’s got your number, little dude!

Byron seems to have recognized instinctively that there’s another scientist in the house, or at least someone who’s willing to discuss his obsession with air compressors for longer than five minutes.  Dad takes any opportunity to give Byron some plant facts, too, and you can see the lad perk up.  So THAT’s why plants die if you dump salt on them!  Plants get sick too?  Intriguing!

They built the Lego ships, and then they built a hospital (with an air compressor!) for the injured stormtroopers.

Tune in soon, I hope, for more wacky adventures!

My Dad is coming for a week, starting tomorrow, so updates may be sporadic for a time while we’re out doing fun stuff.

Or they might be even more regular, since I’ll have more exciting stuff to report.  Who can say?

For sure we’re gonna take him blackberry picking - he’s as crazy about fresh berries as his berry-crazed daughter - and I reckon there’s a hike or two on the horizon.  I also have some notion to take him to the Fair at the PNE –we’ve been to Playland before, but never to the Fair, which I understand officially marks the end of summer for Vancouverites.

There’s pig races, “mushroom mania” (which should appeal to Dad and Byron BOTH - Dad enjoys mushroom forays and Byron says mushrooms are his favourite vegetable), and “tons of barn fun for the kids!”

“Barn fun.”  Is there any OTHER kind of fun, really?

Guess the 100 most common words in English!

Full disclosure: I only got 45!  Scott got 57.  It’s harder than you’d think it would be, or maybe my mind is just UNCOMMON!

Or else it, y’know, shorts out under pressure.

In light of all the culinary adventuring I’ve been documenting recently, I couldn’t pass up this meme. Stolen from Lisa, who got it from Very Good Taste: 100 things to eat before you die!

The rules:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten. (my bold isn’t very bold, so I’m marking them with a ++)
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating. (HAHAHAHA! Guess how many I crossed out! No, really! Guess!)
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

And adding my own #5 - add comments, and add whatever crazy food you’ve eaten that ought to have been included!

(list under the fold)

read more from "The Omnivore’s 100"

Byron knows more about electronics than I do.  Not that that is, by definition, very much — but still!  Today we were in his room, fixing the hyperdrive (*sigh*  Stupid hyperdrive!  It’s always broken!), when we had the following conversation:

B: Somebody sabotaged the hyperdrive!

Me: Oh, no!  Let’s fix it!

B: [holds up plastic toy nail from his tool playset]  Oh, I see, this is the problem.  The electricity can’t get through.

Me: It can’t?

B: [sighs meaningfully] No, Chewie, it can’t.  It’s made of plastic, it’s an insulator.

Me: Oh.

B: Oh, wait, I know!  Now it’s made out of silicon!  Now it will conduct electricity!

Me: Uh.  Are you sure about that?  I don’t think it…

B: Yes it does, Mom.

And wouldn’t you just know it.  Silicon is a semiconductor, of course.  Silly me.

Scott: So what have you two been up to today?

Me: Ha HA! I can’t tell you. It’s a surprise.

Scott: Oh yeah? Put Byron on the phone.

Me: I’m not falling for that one!

Scott: I coulda had the whole thing out of him in minutes!

Me: Exactly!

–Later that day –

Me: So when are we going to give Daddy his surprise?

Byron: Shhh! We can’t tell him!

Me: Well, right, we’re not going to tell him now, but when should we tell him? After supper?

Byron: Shhh, Mom, we will never tell him!

Me: Dude, it’s a surprise, not a SECRET. We’ve got to tell him sometime!

Byron: I don’t think that’s a good idea.

–At dinner–

Me: So how was your day, old man?

Scott: Pretty crappy.

Byron: Do you think a PIE could cheer you up, Dad?

Scott: PWN*!

* NB to the non-nerds in my audience (as if there were any): pwn.

So we made Duck with Hazelnuts, Cucumber Relish, barley, and Ancient Athenian Coleslaw!

Okay, that last one wasn’t its official name, but that’s what it WAS: raw cabbage salad with a honey-vinegar dressing and assorted stinky spices.

The hazelnut crust on the duck was pretty burnt. Next time, I think I’ll change the recipe a bit, maybe cook the duck for an hour and then start ladling on the honey-wine-hazelnut sauce. That’s the beauty of ancient recipes: they list ingredients, but not much more than that. You can mess around until you get the tastiest possible result.

Not that it wasn’t tasty. It was delicious, indeed, even if the duck itself was a bit stringy and gamy. I actually prefer gamy duck. This duck, in particular, was a Bad Ass Duck. It only had one leg - I kid not - the other having been lost, one can only assume, in some kind of duck knife fight. No Lame Duck jokes, please, or the Differently-Abled Duck Association (DADA) will be on you like pond scum.

O Muse! Give me the words now to describe the stanky spices, and my heroic acquisition of them! In addition to the asafoetida - which smells, if you can imagine, like sweetly perfumed rotten eggs - we acquired rue and catmint by ingenious means. Our neighborhood is crawling with herbalists, and while their pretension is primarily medicinal, some of these herbs are antique culinary plants that have fallen out of favor. Rue, in particular, can cause hideous blisters if you get the oil on your skin and then expose it to sunlight; also, not good for the pregnant women. Apparently that is not considered worth the trouble for its wacky, bitter taste.

Catmint is actually catnip. I suppose I could have hit the pet store for that, but I didn’t feel like ripping open a little felt mouse to get at it.

The herbalist didn’t know squat about my herbs, and I think the manic glint in my eye - the glee of the culinary adventurer! - freaked him out a bit. He was more at home advising an older woman, his previous customer, that standing on her head would improve her circulation, and these fifteen supplements would help her digestion and stress level. She bought it, the whole line.

I don’t need supplements. I have crazy interests!

The ancient Greek cookbook I got for my birthday requires asafoetida for almost every recipe, but believe it or not, asafoetida is not available at most grocery stores. A quick internet search turned up almost no prospects, but when I learned it’s also used in Indian cooking, suddenly it was just a matter of trekking over to Punjabi Market and entering the first grocery I saw:

Oh yes, I am HARD CORE! The clerk was falling all over herself: “This is the most important Indian spice! You will cook wonderful food with this!” An older woman peeked around the edge of the aisle, grinning at the wacky white lady.

There’s a reason it’s called “Devil’s Dung”, this spice. The clerk warned me over and over again, “It’s very strong! Only use a little!”

I didn’t have the heart to tell them it wasn’t for Indian food at all. They were practically blowing kisses at me as I left.

In other news: my son is much more cheerful today, the pecking order and my Authoritah (such as it is) having been reestablished. We all know where we stand, now. He’s been peacefully building Star Wars ships out of blocks. Here’s a Star Destroyer and the Millennium Falcon.

Note: he thinks a “sci-fi chasm” is a real part of a large ship or space station. That’s my fault — I’m always like, “Tee-hee! Don’t fall down the sci-fi chasm!” whenever Luke is desperately trying not to fall down the… well, what IS that thing? Why would you incorporate a nearly bottomless pit into the construction of Cloud City or the Death Star? Aside from the fact that it gives you a dramatic place to stage a light-saber battle, I mean.

For Byron to go back to his jolly old pugnacious self, after his vacation?  Yeah.  Well, three if you count last night, where he warned me (from the naughty spot): “You may die, Mom!”

Then he turned his baleful eye upon his father and said: “And you’re NEXT!”

“Death threats get your Legos taken away,” said Scott.

“I CAN ARRANGE FOR THAT!” bellowed the lad.  I have a feeling he doesn’t know what that phrase means.

We spent a good portion of today butting heads as well, or rather, him butting, me dodging.  There’s a difference in the air.  Two weeks ago when he wouldn’t put his swimsuit on, I tried to put it on him and learned that I can no longer do that if he’s opposing me with everything he’s got.  Today, I did it differently: I took him to the store wearing a shirt, pajama bottoms, and rubber boots with no socks.

The boots rubbed him wrong and made him sore.  “I’m so sorry your feet hurt,” I said.

“Maybe that’s why we wear socks,” he said.

“Maybe you’ll remember that next time,” I said.

Maybe he won’t question why we wear pants.

Granville Island Spray Park this afternoon.  God I’m whipped, and I wasn’t the one playing in the spray.  I was just sitting there in the hot, hot sun, hoping sunscreen doesn’t expire because I’d brought the oldest tube of it.

Admiring the preternatural whiteness of my legs.  Jeez.  I look downright vampiric.

Pizza for dinner.  Scott’s at some TRIUMF BBQ thingy, intended to woo new postdocs or something.  Five-year-olds not considered conducive to that goal, nor pasty-white wives, alas.

But that’s okay.  We’ve got pizza.  We’ve got rhythm.  We’ve got Byron’s Lego rendition of the rebel base on ice planet Hoth.  Who could ask for anything more?