Entrapment in Evanston

While we were on the deck, the girls, Maddie and Martina took a ball of string and made a very cool game out of it. They arranged all the kitchen chairs and wrapped the string crisscross across all of them. If anyone saw the movie Entrapment, you know the image. It's where the lasers make the beams that Catherine Zeda Jones has to cross through. That's what the girls did! It was a great show of imagination, especially in the electronic world of today!!

Katieface, back for more.

On Saturday afternoon, we picked up our friend Katieface, from the airport. We whisked her away to the house and promptly served her many glasses of wine. Dean did ribs on the BBQ, and they were scrumptious. The rest of the night we sat on the deck and chitchatted. Maddie's friend Martina came for a sleepover, so we coerced her dad Chris into sharing a beer on the deck. It officially feels like summer now!

No more Breakfast Nook! Please!

Before the canadian teams were dumped from the playoffs, I was watching hockey every night. Selena had A LOT of scrapbooking to do, so it worked out nicely. Every year, you get to see a lot of commercials over and over again. The bad ones really begin to annoy. All you hockey fans know what I am talking about. I hated Scotia's Bank's "Breakfast Nook" the most. You know the one. Anyway, why am I babbling about commercials? I saw this one while watching (what else?) CSI. It is entitled What If Firefighters Ran The World - funny, creative and worth 30 seconds of your time. Enjoy!

Oh yes we did!!

OK, those who know me, and have a seen a glimpse of any scrapbooking I have done, will not be surprised by what I am about to say. I am a pack rat. I save every piece of memorabilia from everywhere important to me. I am the farthest thing from a "photographic mind". I need to SEE, in front of me, everything. When a memory is in my hands, I'm happy! so..... then understanding all of this about me, you will see why we turned the Blog.... into a Book!! Oh yes we did. Dean found a printing company online called Lulu, who will take the PDF's that you send them, and print out a bound, "professional looking" book, with your own hard cover design on it!!!! This is the greatest thing I have ever heard of since sliced bread! Every blog entry, and yes the comments too, from Dec 1 to April 19 2008 are in this book! What else can I turn into a book? I must go look!!!

If anyone else in interested in publishing a book you can go to Lulu

http://www.lulu.com/content/2411923 also, if anyone was interested you can order our book there too!! LOL

Don't worry about the expiry date...

At the end of our tour of The Katrina Site, our busdriver handed out coupons. We noticed the expiry date was for 2005? She said, don't worry about the expiry date, the cards were printed before Katrina!

Cafe du Monde

A package arrived today, From Cafe du Monde, New Orleans. The cafe on Decatur street that stays open 24 hours a day, 364 days a year. It has been open since 1860. And let me tell you, they know how to make coffee! A little yellow can with a pound of coffee inside can bring much joy to this household. What a great way to prolong a holiday, order it to your doorstep. We're seriously thinking of becoming a member of the coffee club. You get a pound of coffee mailed to you every month! We also received a tasty sweet donut mix called a "beignet". We ate them in New Orleans but haven't made ours yet, so we'll keep you posted.

Well, off to have our coffee and look through the catalog.

Attention K-Mart Shoppers!

K-mart in Pen Plaza in the heart of Manhattan.

Another Lost Blog:

The tour guides on the downtown tour would always take the opportunity to point out the K-Mart when we passed it. Why? Because it has a really interesting story. The first thing the tour guide asks when you pass it is if you notice anything strange about the store. After a few seconds of staring at blank faces, he says triumphantly "No parking lot!" And then launches into to the story of Manhattan's K-Mart. Here is what he told us:

K-mart was at first very relunctant to open a store in Manhattan because there was no parking. How are you going to get your larger items home on the subway? The City of New York made K-Mart a very attractive offer. They said try it for two years and if it fails, the City will pick up your lease for the two years. So K-Mart opened in Manhattan. The K-mart in Manhattan is the number one in the country for sales and made so much profit that K-mart was able to close a whack of stores in other parts of the US without hurting profits.

However, we are not sure that the story is true. We have been unable to substatiate this story. In fact, according to a December 1994 New York Times article (click to see the article), Manhattan was a complete change in strategy from a company in response to Walmart's new dominance in the discount marketplace. The article specifically says that no incentives were offered:

"No state and city subsidies or tax abatements were offered to lure the giant retailer. As America becomes saturated with discount outlets like Kmart and Wal-Mart, high-rent urban centers like Manhattan have become more attractive. The Manhattan move is part of a larger strategy by Kmart to tap fresh markets in the face of flagging earnings and sharp cost cutbacks. Because of aggressive openings in recent years, Kmart officials said they now have at least one store in each of the most populous 50 metropolitan areas."

The profit part of the story seems to be true as K-Mart returned to profitability for a short time after they open their stores in Manhattan. However, it would appear the City of New York never offered any special incentives for them to move there. If the City of New York offered K-Mart incentives like the tour guide described the New York Times would have known about it and reported it. But it is strange that a native New Yorker like our tour guide would get something like this wrong. Hmmm. We report. You decide.

Fome Fugar for your coffee?

We took this picture at the Williams-Sonoma 4 storey kitchen store in San Francisco. Ruby and Jade were in town for baseball this weekend and Ruby noticed something strange about the recipe picture:


Click to enlarge.

You will notice some curious spelling mistakes in this recipe. We never noticed this when we took the picture and Ruby thought the mistakes are why we took the picture. Haha.

So this got us thinking and we wanted to know why the spelling mistakes were there. Well, through the magic of the internet, we were able to shed some light on this.


The above recipe appears to be from a old cookbook published in 1792 called The Universal Cook: And City and Country Housekeeper By Francis Collingwood, John Woollams.

Courtesy of Google, this book has been digitized here:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=xJMEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=toc&vq=fugar#PPA245,M1


If you click on the link above, you will see the term "fugar" used throughout the book and also the practice of replacing the letter "s" with the letter "f".


So there you have it, it must have been a '90s thing. The 1790s.

Lost Blog: Cab Fight!

We were at the Southside Seaport and we had just gotten off the Water Taxi where we had just taken a great tour of New York Harbour. We were walking down the street and came upon our first and only cab fight. Papparazzi Selena was right there secretly snapping photos so the guy wouldn't see us and come over and smash our camera or something. It is amazing to me that more of these fights don't happen.

The man at the cabbie's door owns that black car at the right.

He thought the cabbie ran the stop sign and let him know

what he thought of that literally face to face.

Altered Book

Has anyone heard of this idea? I didn't even know it existed. I found a "how to book" in the scrapbooking section at chapters, and since then the name keeps coming up. We were watching Pirates of the Caribbean, and there it is. An altered book right in the movie. If you remember the scene with the pirate lords. The book of codes is an altered book. What it is, is a book that you glue, saw, drill, tear, and staple anything you want into it. You take a regular book. Change everything about it so that there is no trace of the original in site, and voila you have an altered book. We had some leftover items from our Honeymoon, so we thought we may try this out. Here is the start of it.