Writ of Mainprize

The winter in Toronto seemed to be very long, but spring is here! In fact, spring came fast and hard. It was 27oC yesterday! Incroyable!.
I meant to take these pictures yesterday or the day before, but some of our flowers have bloomed nicely. We got a little rain today, so maybe a few more flowers will come up. The magnolia tree across the street has just about bloomed. Hopefully I will remember to take a picture of it!

You need to switch your language setting to Chinese (Big5) need to be able to view Unicode to see the symbols correctly in this table:

Counting in Cantonese

1
一
yat1
 
6
六
luk6

2
二
yi6
 
7
七
chaat1

3
三
saam1
 
8
八
bat3

4
四
sei3
 
9
九
gau2

5
五
ng5
 
10
十
sap6

The numbers beside the phonetic spelling represent tone “shapes”. There are 9 tones and 3 tone levels.

Tonal Pronunciation
Tonal Pronunciation

1
High Falling
6
Low Level

2
Low Falling
7
High Level

3
Mid Rising
8
Mid Level (short)

4
Low Rising
9
Low Level (short)

5
Mid Level

Viviene, a friend of ours from work, has returned to Australia. But before she left, me and my housemates helped throw a going away party for her. To mark the occasion, we made an Australia Cake. This cake was a triple batch of an Orange Cointreau cake (Orange Rum Cake, Joy of Cooking), cut into 6 pieces and rearranged into the shape of Australia. The design of the “interlocking” pieces was so good that only a small piece was left over as “waste”!

I was at a friend’s house on the weekend and he had a jar of ‘peanuts only’ peanut butter (I don’t remember the brand name but it was fairly unique to one of his neighbourhood grocery stores).  I’ve tried other ‘natural’, ‘no sugar added’, ‘peanuts only’ peanut butters and they usually really translate to ‘no flavour’ or ’stick in your craw’ peanut butter.  This new one was actually decent.  I bought a few bottles — I have peanut butter and jam sandwiches everyday and I thought this would be a …

O.k. this past weekend had the crappiest weather of the entire winter (yes, apparently even though we are past the equinox, it’s still BLOODY winter!). I think it snowed/rained/drizzle/slushed/puked for 48 hours straight. And it thunderstormed too! Lightning and snow at the same time was very strange. And the slush-rain was bizarre — these huges globules of slime fell from the sky on Saturday that completely bonded to everything it fell on. I swear, when I cleaned the car, it took only half a dozen …