Bike bums...

Yesterday was Selena's last class of her summer course (though she still has a final paper to write). I needed to go downtown on an errand. I've been  hearing that there is a Buritto Boyz, a favourite of mine from Toronto, in Hamilton. My knee has seems pretty much back to normal. I've long wanted to check out more of the Hamilton waterfront trail. I've been harassing Selena now-and-again that she should ride her bike to the University -- it's faster than the bus! -- but she has declined for all sorts of crazy reasons: snow, rain, sweat, heavy bags, the mountain, and silly trivia like that. So, why not take this last chance of the year to combine all these things! I started plotting... a route. Here it is....

McMaster - Downtown - Waterfront - Mountain at EveryTrail

We biked first to the University. We left a bit later than expected due to last minute misplacing of things that needed to be found. Selena's class started at 11. We left at 10:15. It takes the bus almost exactly 1 hour to get from here to the University (including one transfer downtown), so she'd have been late if we took the bus. We arrived and, a bit to our surprise because we did not ride very fast, found we still had 10 minutes to spare -- it had only taken about 35 minutes.

Admittedly there was sweat. But anyhow, Selena had time to cool of a bit. I got to finally see her office desk a the University, after all this time. In fact I got to sit at it for 3 hours and do my own thing there while she went to class. (I'd brought my laptop; I had stuff to do.)

After class we headed downtown. We mess up the planned route a bit, somehow mistaking Main St for King St and getting a little confused. But it all worked out. Unfortunately the GPS signal got lost on the errand, and I didn't notice until we were waiting for our order at Burrito Boyz -- hence the straight line across downtown on the map to when the GPS regained its fix.

And finally, with burritos: to the waterfront! We had a pretty relaxing lunch sitting in a secluded spot by the lake. Alas, the Hamilton Buritto Boyz (at least this time) does not match up to the venerable Toronto (Adelaide St) shop; this is to say the burritos were okay, but not spectacular as every single one of the Toronto ones I've had over the years has been. But that's okay! It made for a good picnic anyhow.

After a while, we kept on around the waterfront, discovering (as suspected) you can go under the highway on the trail over to Cootes Paradise. From there it's basically a straight line back to the mountain. The Chedoke stairs are "bike-friendly". They have a groved ramp along side the steps which you can push your bike up, so you don't haver to carry it. So, 289 steps later -- with a few breaks on landings along the way -- we were in the home stretch.

In closing, I have asked Selena what she would like to say about her bum. She says, "HURTS!" That is all. But she did it. 30 km is a pretty good distance for not having biked much for quite a while. It's a pretty long distance for most people, period. But we need to continue to build up the bum stamina for the summer! And we will. Oh, we will....

And when we got back, we found this little fellow had bloomed in the front garden... to welcome us home.

Sadza & Selena

Here is something like what Selena's "Decolonizing Bodies" class is up to today. This picture is from the trial run she did of the recipe this weekend. What you are looking at is sadza, a Zimbabwean (and other African countries) staple food made from fine corn meal, served with many things. In this case Selena is offering a spicy tomato relish, with greens. She is actually giving a short presentation responding to some elements of Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. Sadza is a feature of life in the story, so Selena thought it would be interesting to make some for the class to sample while she presents and they discuss. She's weird like that.

And by weird, of course, I mean great.

That would be the end of the nice story, except that, as it turned out, suddenly yesterday just when she had intended to make the stuff some combination of mysterious conditions nervously coincided and she came down with a severe migraine. She had started to work on the tomato relish, while I went out to fetch some last minute forgotten ingredients.By the time I got back, she had gone back to bed, feeling too poorly to continue (the smell of food actually making her feel worse). So, it seemed it was up to me -- entirely out of my competence with many of these ingredients -- to try to finish putting the stuff together.

My guide was the recipe from the internet, and my memory of how the trial run had tasted and looked. The recipe instructions were fairly detailed, but many of the details were opaque to me. I have never worked with kale. I've never ground my own coriander seeds. And so on! Oh well! I figured at least probably no one in her class would be very familiar with Zimbabwe cuisine, so if I mess up the spices and make it taste really weird maybe they'll just think it's that much more exotic. And if I mess up the spices in another way and it just tastes bland, well then maybe it'll be considered as a "Westernized" version, and at least no one will have a strong reaction against it. Who knows!

In the morning Selena checked it out. After a slight pepping up with a bit of salt declared it "okay". Wheh! She then went on to make the actual Sadza itself.

I'm sure the class will have fun with the food, and appreciate Selena's effort. They never need know that some part of their semi-authentic Zimbabwe taste experience was hacked together by the awkward husband in desperation late the night before.

Puffballelena

Here's the giant puff ball that Selena was so ecstatic to have stumbled upon in the woods a few weeks ago. It is large. Gigantic, even.

She sliced and fried a good bit of it for dinner, but didn't take the internet's advice about cooking it all right away. By the next day the creamy white insides of the remains of thing had begun to yellow -- a sign that it was going to spore, which is not good to eat. So a bunch of the poor giant thing went out... but maybe... maybe those spores will sprout again... in my mom's back yard?!