Speaking of fruit…

I just came across this article on how to freeze fruit, thanks to my favourite blog for just about everything, lifehacker. I just thought I’d share (also, blogging it helps me make sure I don’t lose the link )

Incidentally, I was very glad to see that the 2 litres of blueberries I froze yesterday unknowingly followed the right instructions, although I’m a bit surprised that they don’t suggest dry pack for raspberries and strawberries, especially since when I buy either of those frozen, I never by the kind in sugar or syrup.

Burpees and other healthy stuff

So, as you might have guessed, the 3 day lag of burpees back on June 17th, combined with some rather intense intensity at work, and the preparation of my wedding led to my sudden and unfortunate abandonment of the challenge. Since then I have done a set now and then, and promised myself that I would pick up where I left off, but it seems like the intense intensity is going nowhere, and we are in full preparation for one last wedding celebration and our honeymoon this fall. Is this an excuse? Perhaps.

That said, I have by no means abandoned attempts to generally improve my health, with the latest effort focusing on 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. It sounds so simple, but since I don’t eat huge quantities of food to begin with, I was surprised at how difficult it was. Even so, I believe that I hit the complete target for the first time possibly in my entire life yesterday after ramping up for the past week. The biggest challenge is that I’m not a fan of vegetables (although I love numerous different types of fruit) so my 5 servings have a clearly fruity leaning, but hey. I’m not complaining – I’m just happy that this motivation came suddenly and out of nowhere (well, not exactly nowhere: I’ve been buying blueberries just about every time I go to the grocery store since they first showed up this season, and an embarrassingly significant part of the motivation seems to have come from a form of marketing: a silly computer game that I came across last weekend called the Wonder Juice Machine, which provides (very tantalizing) recipes for smoothies after each level. Speaking of which, I haven’t actually made any since the fruit kick began (although we’ve had fresh-pressed orange+lemon juice 3 times in the past week) and we bought another stock of fruit yesterday, so I should go back and look at some recipes again – wahoo: an excuse to play games for a few minutes (before doing some work, because I’ve got an important deadline on Monday…and Tuesday…and Wednesday…and Friday: apparently Thursday will be my breathing day).

The real me (?)

For the first time in years, someone actually pronounced my name in the way that I mistakenly thought French people always did: Ezzère. It felt a bit weird. I’ve gotten so used to Ezzeur, that when people are having difficulty figuring out how to say it, I give them that to help (and to avoid some other unfortunately butchering). The worst of course is the occasional Alsatian Haether (both with it’s aggressive Germanic pronunciation and its accompanying frequent spelling mistake, such as that on my marriage certificate. Yeah, that’s right. Despite providing who-knows-how-many pieces of ID, loads of papers from myself and from the Canadian Embassy with my name on it (how I love bureaucracy, let me count the ways) the geniuses at City Hall spelled my name wrong on probably one of the most important legal documents I will ever have. Of course, nobody (including myself) noticed: who proofreads what they’re signing in the middle of their wedding ceremony, so we all (myself, Luc, and our 4 “witnesses”) signed a document that had Luc marrying some chick named Haether. That has since been corrected (or so I’m told – I’m not entirely sure how they could have corrected it seeing as how it was signed, and they never showed me the correction; they just provided with me with several “extraits” (which is used in France as a stand in for all such documents pretty much; they don’t give you certified photocopies like in Canada) on which my name was spelled correctly. So yeah, there are many me’s floating around this country apparently, although some come around more often than others. So all that to say that it was weird to “see” Ezzère again.