After thinking about it for months, I finally purchased the Canon 85mm 1.2L II lens at Downtown Camera. It is currently on sale for $400 less in Canada at authorized retailers.
I also happened to have visted my friend Steph today, so I decided to test the new lens on her delicious pastries!
Macarons by Petit Nuage.
Ever since transitioning into adulthood – the strange world after univeristy/college – my social life has noticeably changed. People have become busier because of their careers or because they have started families. The only times I’ve hung out with people are at concerts (but those are a different kind of people) or while having a meal.
It’s like I don’t know what to do with people if we are not eating (or having the drink which I put under the same category). I don’t think it’s entirely my fault either. I think meal plans are more concrete, everybody has to eat and they can easily be booked in your calendar. Want to meet me at the restaurant for 6pm? sounds like a better plan that Want to come over and play board games? One sounds a lot easier to cancel than the other. Plus, who knows if the other person wants to play games with you, but again.. everybody has to eat.
Food also helps with any awkward silences. You can have the excuse “too busy eating to talk”. Also when it’s over, you are not obligated to continue the night. This is different when you invite someone over to your house and you want to go to bed but you still have to kick the person out.
I seriously don’t know what adults do with each other between meals. I can amuse myself fine: with blogging, cleaning, art and various hobbies but it’s hard to invite someone else into those situations (unless hey, you really want to help me clean my apartment).
What do you do with your friends?
A lot of the times I prefer cider to beer because I find them more drinkable with meals. Like beers, I’ve been looking to try more Canadian-made craft beers rather than the mass-produced kinds. My recent favourites are Brickworks Premium Dry Cider and Okanagan’s Dry Pear.
The Brickworks also comes in a semi-sweet variety (which I haven’t tried yet). They are made with 100% Ontario apples Their site says that “No apple in our cider travels further than 300 kilometres from the tree to the Ciderhouse.” 5% of all their profits also go to environmental organization Evergreen. Their apple cider is perfectly balanced in term of sweetness. It goes down easy like apple juice but doesn’t feel too sugary.
While Okanagan makes an apple cider I decided to try the pear. On their website there are actually a variety of fruit ciders. Anyways the pear cider was nice and crisp. It wasn’t like the Sir Perry Pear cider that was way too sweet, the Okanagan balanced the sweetness as well as Brickworks.
With both these ciders I didn’t feel like I was having some “girly” drink. These were authentic to the fruit flavour but tart enough to be an adult drink.
We’re nearing the end of March and I have some catch up to do in terms of filling up my sketchbook in time for the challenge but here are a few more random pages:
One of the biggest treasure troves of Dollarama is its toy selection. I wish I had such a cheap selection of toys at my disposal when I was a kid. Anyways, recently I picked up Bejeweled Bitz, a game that began originally as a Facebook game.
The box comes in a nice case of 84 cards that have two gems on each. There are also 7 plastic boost gems you collect for extra points.
The game is played by drawing cards and making lines of cards. Matching 3 in a row combines those cards into a deck. Chains can also be made as a result (like the real game). The game is over when the deck runs out. The winner is the person with the most points. Points are calculated by counting the numbers of cards in your largest pile. The jewels count as 5 extra points each and are obtained by being the first person to make a row of the corresponding shape.
The game is a lot of chance, but there’s some thinking involved to in terms of where you place the cards. For $3, this was actually worth it as it’s a great adaptation of the mobile game.
Do you ever feel like you are the embarrassing character in a sitcom? There are times where I feel like I am such a clutz that everything bad or terrible always happens to me. Sometimes at the same time. I can never seem to catch a break.
I was having such a great weekend and then I dropped my external hard drive. Thankfully it still works. Then I lost my Metropass somehow. My Monday is off to a great start.
Sometimes these things would send me into a downward spiral . It’s hard not to want to cry, and sometimes that’s okay. But really whenever bad things happen, I think about times where I have had it worse. When there was a fire on the subway and it is delayed followed by buses that couldn’t make it up the hill because of a storm. The time I was cleaning the house and then tripped over the broomstick and hit my head on the counter. A slip and fall on ice that scraped my knee, another in front of a packed bus.
Somehow thinking of myself like a weird character in my own life story makes me feel a little bit better. I can laugh it off and know that I’ll live to tell another episode.
Meerkat is the latest craze in live video streaming that was buzzing at SXSW. It has great potential as a way to share live events and push it to Twitter. However, Twitter actually purchased a very similar app called Periscope. But it is Meerkat that is getting more of the attention and has already raised over $12 million in venture capital funding.
Last night I streamed my own video for the first time. It was a live feed of my turtles (basically doing nothing) and it gained 15 viewers in seconds, many of which weren’t previously my Twitter followers. I don’t know where they came from but I guess the app is so popular now that people are looking for new feeds to follow!
You can find me at http://meerkatapp.co/tianafeng/.
For my birthday, my friend Nilabjo (yes that’s a real name) bought me a Travelzoo gift certificate for Wild Burger near Yonge & Eglington.
I’ve never heard of it prior to getting the certificate but their menu selection quite literally lives up to their name. They offer a variety of burger meats including elk, bison, venison, ostrich, kangaroo and camel. They also advertise sustainable food and flavours that represent the diversity of Canada.
I chose the camel burger which came with a sweet cilantro sauce, brie, baby spinach, mango, dried fruit salsa and onions. I’ve never had camel but it had a texture and consistency of beef but was much lighter tasting. I loved the cilantro sauce and I thought all the ingredients married together. There was also a nice crunch that I wasn’t sure if it was from the spinach or something else.
As my side, I chose the duck fat fries garlic fries. They were great on their own but I also tried dipping them in a selection of house-made sauces. One of the strangest was a banana-mustard.
Nash settled on the Chimichuri Elk Burger that had chipotle aoli, brie and a fried egg. Elk is a lean meat so this can be downed so easily!
He accompanied his burgers with fried pickles. I stole quite a few because they had a perfect crunch. They were sliced in a way that didn’t give you too much pickle or too much breading.
To drink I tried a Social Lite for the first time in Lemon Cucumber Mint. It was an alcoholic cooler of some sort but I didn’t find it as flavourful as the fancy cocktails you could find around town. It advertises no sugar, but I feel like it needed it.
We really enjoyed our burgers at Wild Burger and now I’m itching to try all the other types of patties!
I’m not at SXSW but I was reading this article on how attendees have job descriptions in their bio that nobody understands. Most are filled with buzz words that you have no idea what they are talking about half the time. This doesn’t just happen at SXSW by the way. Last weekend during brunch, I overheard a guy have a full on conversation full of buzz words that really just have empty meanings, sound cool but have no substance. Anyways, today I stumbled on this bogus job description generator.
The first few I got were close enough
Then it just got weird:
I’ve been busy this past while with JUNOS and post-JUNOS stuff. I thought I’d take you through some of those adventures through Instagram. It was my first time covering JUNO weekend. It just never worked out logistically in the past. When I went to get my ID made, they turned me blue!
On Friday, SOCAN had their Friends & Family party. My publicist friends decided it would be fun to switch places and for once they’d be the photographers.
Then I went to a hiphop show at a venue by the lake. It was kind of like Hamilton’s version of Sound Academy.
We stayed up until 2am waiting for Saukrates (one of my co-worker’s favourites) to go on.
On Saturday we woke up early and had brunch at Jack & Lois.
After brunch we interviewed Jenn Grant, who is the most awesome in person.
The TD Lounge were supporting local Hamilton schools and I saw these adorable kids play!
I almost didn’t get into this Rich Aucoin show (he owns every city he is in) but I waited patiently in line and the bouncer let me in. I ended up leaving a whole bunch of confetti in my co-worker’s car.
On Sunday Morning, I attended the JUNOS songwriter circle where songwriters shared stories before performing acoustic versions of their songs.
Backstage of the JUNOS gala, I sat beside my friend Sarah and dropped her piece of complimentary cake. Oops!
Life is interesting sometimes and Instagram is such a great way to relive it!
Tiana Feng 
