The Felix House revisited

I just dug these up from a couple of months ago. My sister joined Mike and I for dinner at his Mom's house, and we stopped by the old Felix Leclerc house again so she could see it in all it's decaying, crumbly gloriousness. It was a gorgeous day, sort of a fluke weekend in the middle of April, the weather got all perfect and Spring timey, and all the leaves started to come out and then we got snow again. All that has changed though and now it feels like mid July here in Montreal. Yesterday was so hot out, it was comparable to the temperatures we felt on our Southern road trip last Summer!

Anyhow, this dress is something I have worn about a million times since my sister's friend gave it to her a couple years ago. I can't believe it hasn't shown up on this blog before...and I think I'll need to do it justice in a post where you can see it a little clearer. But it's a handmade dress that this girl's Grandmother made for herself years ago, and it's just about my favourite item in my closet! The rest is all thrifted, except those sandals that are Miss Mooz that I bought via Endless.com and had shipped to Quincy who so graciously shipped them across the border to me! I wear them all the time, they're the comfiest things in the world!

Well Mike gets back in a little over a week and we're leaving the very next morning for a few days in Boston where I have a very exciting blogger meetup planned! One I've been hoping to make happen for ages, but hasn't been possible until now! Either way, Boston is so pretty that I'm sure lots of blog photo opportunities will present themselves and I'll have some material to share with you guys for Mike's next tour!

Random Post

Outfit Details:
shorts: Aryn K via Modcloth
hat & tights: UO
jacket: H&M

I wanna thank you all so much for all the awesome vegan cooking sites you sent me! I've accumulated quite a stack of recipes I'd like to try, and I think I'll start with some baking this weekend! In the mean time, I'll leave you with a small list of things I'm into right now. Since this blog is turning into a personal journal anyway!

• The Black Keys & Bones Malones. Both of these groups have a way of making me feel like I get cooler when I listen to them. I'll be seeing them both live soon. Bones Malones actually used to work at the cafe I work at and will be performing here next week, and if any of you are in Montreal, you should definitely stop by and check it out! Especially if you're into raspy Tom Waits-ish blues and such! As for the Black Keys, well they're playing our Montreal music fest, Osheaga and I'll be there this year, since Mike and I couldn't afford a trip to Tennessee for Bonnaroo!
  
• Francesca's post about wanting to overhaul her closet and fill it with simple pinks and blacks and navy blues! It hit the nail right on the head with how I've been feeling too!
  
• Homemade mint lemonade. I don't generally like mint in things, but I never knew how much more I would like my lemonade with some fresh mint in there!
  
• Vegan Yum Yum, which a bunch of you suggested to me. It's page after page after page of delicious vegan recipes, that are really, really well explained and so pretty to look at!
• Small Czech towns that Mike is visiting and writing me about right now! And the fact that his band, Trigger Effect made it into the top ten of three different categories of the Montreal Mirror's Best of Montreal 2010 Poll!

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! If all goes according to plan I will be surrounding myself with packing boxes and egg substitutes, and will try to remember to take pictures of my baking endeavors to share with you next week!

Spring time Productivity

I think I'm going through my annual bout of Spring-weather-induced productivity fever! I feel like I must be repeating myself at this point, but between school being over and Mike being away, I have all this time to myself and I thought it would drag on, but it's more like there aren't enough hours in the day! I keep accidentally staying up way too late reading (Just got done with a Flannery O'Connor novel Rhiannon sent me a few months back, and am finally getting started on Leonard Cohen's first novel....something I should've read ages ago!) and then getting up really early to walk Lola and go to work and then when I come home I just want to cook new vegan recipes and make crafts and listen to Bessie Smith until it's time to read again!

To be honest, I'm sort of relieved not to have the internet right now, because I feel like I'm just getting so much more done! I've even written real letters to some friends and family in far away places, and sent it to them by snail mail! And I took up my knitting again, and I've even got TWO houseplants now! If I can get these guys through the Summer, I'll look into starting a little urban garden in my new apartment! Honestly I get like this every Spring time, I get all fed up of the internet and I feel like it prevents me from living my life to the fullest, and that seems to be the general consensus in the blogging world right now from what I've read, but it's probably just Spring fever, and I think by next Winter when it gets chilly again I'll be happy to lie under the blankets reading blogs and spending a few hours just replying to comments and e-mails.
In the mean time though, you'll have to forgive me for being a bad commenter! And know that I still appreciate all of your comments so, so much! It's just hard when I only check the internet sporadically from internet cafes.

Anyhow, these are just some more pictures from my weekend in Sutton with Mike. Tomorrow is the one week mark from when he left, which means only four more to go! Bare with me while I get really sad and pathetic as the time goes on! Truth be told, he's been touring since we started dating three years ago, but I still haven't gotten any better at being independent while he's gone. Anyway, this was at the prettiest cemetery I've seen since the one we visited in Savannah, GA last Summer. It is tiny and right in the middle of a big field, down a dirt road surrounded by mountains and greenery and all the tomb stones are old and cracked and creepy and nobody was around and the patches of dead grass made it even better. We spent a really long time there reading the names and the dates on the stones, and then we drove for a really long time down random back roads through the mountains and it was just a beautiful warm perfect day! I'm glad we took pictures, cause I sort of wanna remember it for a really long time!

Thanks again for all your sweet comments all the time. They mean so much to me! And sorry for two outfit posts in a row. I don't have much time to browse the web for inspiring things to post about, so in the mean time, it'll just be random pictures of me and the things I've been doing!

A weekend in the Townships

Mike left with his band (Trigger Effect)yesterday for a five week tour of Europe, and while I can't quite figure out how I'll get through five weeks of him being so, so far away, I'm also so incredibly excited for him that I think I'll get by! (You should all go check his tour dates and go see 'em play if they're in your neck o' the woods! I promise if you introduce yourself to Mike - the sweaty drummer guy - he'll be super friendly and you'll become great pals! Plus their music is awesome!) Anyhoo, in order to keep up our ongoing pre-tour tradition, we packed up and got out of the city for the weekend to spend some quality one on one time together before he flies over the ocean to such a distant land!

So this time, we headed back to a little place called Sutton, which we spent some time in a few years back, probably before I was blogging....we brought our bikes with us and planned our weekend around taking some sort of a scenic bike ride around the Eastern Townships, which is a super picturesque part of Quebec which sort of lines the Vermont border.
After a long interrogation (in vain might I add) with the clerk at the information booth, we finally found out about the sort of path we were looking for from a man we met at an antique store, and headed out working hard to convince ourselves that the sort of overcast weather would be good and keep us cool....but in the end the sun took its cue and right as we hopped on our bikes it showed its face and didn't go away at all, except for a fifteen minute downpoor about two thirds of the way into our ride back to the cottage.

We did good for beginners, and did about thirty miles of beautiful scenic bike riding, and then rewarded ourselves with a picnic and some sun-soaking by a really pretty stream we found along the way! Anyhow, the whole weekend was just perfect, filled with silly inside jokes and lazy nights in and busy days out and fancy antique stores and road side junk shops and perfect weather and just about all the good quality time two people can fit into one weekend, so it wasn't so bad seeing him off seeing as we got all that good stuff in before hand!


Now I'm all lost and don't know what to do since I finally finished my semester, and don't have the internet, and my boyfriend is on tour, and all my friends work during the day, so today I got back on my bike and discovered some really pretty bike paths right near my apartment! Although, its sort of sad I'm discovering them now when we'll be changing neighbourhoods in just a couple of months...but we'll just have to discover them around there too! I've also given myself a personal challenge to try going vegan for the time that Mike is gone. I have no idea how I'll fare, since my love for cheese and eggs and milk are sometiemes more powerful than whatever will power I may have, and I'll have to change my baking habits, but there isn't much better a time than now while Mike is away and I'm only shopping for myself, and really I don't bake as much in Summer anyway....are any of you guys vegan too? Any good recipes you might wanna suggest?

By the way, thanks for still reading, despite my overdrawn silences and lack of consistent posts or comments! I love you guys and all your blogs andI still check them whenever I get the chance!