plant envy

I wonder how he gets away with that sign!

Whenever I walk by a greenhouse / plant store / market I get this urge to have a garden. This is somewhat problematic given we don’t have a garden, yard or balcony. We might turn our herb planter box into a flower planter box and keep the herbs in pots – this will be decided tomorrow. In the meantime we’ve both discovered that (now that we have an apartment with plenty of windows facing in the right direction) that we want lots of plants in the house. We moved with two plants (one I don’t know the name for and one Oxalis) and now have 7: Marvin the mint plant, Basilik the basil, an unnamed Crown of Thorns cutting, two bamboo shoots and a cactusy/flower thing called Maria in addition to the other two. I planted some Thyme seeds in pots today and am trying to germinate the Oregano ones. They’re so small I wonder how I will know they have germinated – they’re smaller than poppy seeds!

We went to Atwater market today since we didn’t fancy a 3 hour bike ride in the rain. Compared to Jean-Talon it seems small and pricey! But I did find some jalapeno jelly there (which is very tasty). After we got back home we walked down Sherbrooke into NDG to go and get a) Kimchee, tofu and pickled vegetables at the Korean store and b) chicken at a boucherie. We have been getting some very good chicken at one near Jean-Talon and last week Lisa came with us and pointed out that it was a Halal boucherie. We hadn’t paid much attention to that before but it might explain why the chicken tastes so good – so we got today’s chicken at a Halal boucherie nearby and will see how it compares. And … I can’t believe there are so many types of pickled cucumber! We also went to D.A.D.s Bagel & discovered they had homemade naan there so we will give that a try with this week’s curry.

We also discovered Co-op La maison verte which has a wealth of envrionmentally friendly resources including eco cleaners (in bulk) and a free book on how to make your own household cleaners. Everything looks very simple except for laundry detergent, so next time we run out we will try theirs.

We’ve been having fun playing the Intellivision. So far the favourites are Burger time (of course), Lock ‘n Chase, Night Stalker and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I remember having a lot of fun playing the latter as a kid and when I started out this time I accidentally chose the hardest setting – then after reading the manual I figured out how to choose the easiest setting and managed to win after a few tries. With Night Stalker we both managed to get to the white robot stage but he’s very hard to kill and it will be a while before we get to the invisible robot stage.

The overhead light in the living room wasn’t working and Dan discovered that the switch was loose in the wall and was able to put it back in place. Hooray for proper lighting!

I really need to get the gallery situation sorted out! So in the meantime, here’s another photo. As a funny aside, I met the girlfriend of the son of the owners of this restaurant in Toronto at the Bioinformatics course. It’s two blocks away from our place.