Ruffles All-Dressed Potato Chips

Last night, while hanging out with some attractive people and rolling some Platonic solids, I was offered some of these:

These, as you can probably tell from the picture, are Ruffles All-Dressed Potato Chips. "All dressed" isn't really a phrase applied to food in the States.

I encountered "all dressed" when we were trying to figure out how to order a pizza to our corporate housing. The top choices for toppings were Hawaiian and "All Dressed." Hawaiian is what I thought it would be--ham and pineapple, and closer inspection of All Dressed revealed it is pepperoni, green peppers, and mushrooms.

I assumed that this particular chip flavor would be similar, but based on the packaging, it has vinegar, onion, and tomato flavors. One thing I have not been quite able to bring myself to eat here has been ketchup flavored potato chips (saying "here" is a bit off because you can get them in Virginia and I didn't eat 'em there, either), so when my companions told me that they were a lot like ketchup chips, I had my doubts.

Anyway, the all dressed chips weren't too bad! They reminded me in passing of my favorite chip in the Whole Wide World, the Utz Carolina Style Bar-B-Q chip:
The Washington, DC area was right on the Carolina/Crab Line, where in some stores the specialty chip flavor was Crab Chips (Old Bay flavored) and in others it was Carolina Style.

Carolina Style chips are kind of like vinegar 'n' barbecue, and the All Dressed chips were kind of comparable, although they didn't have the near-painful kick that Carolina Style do. I will probably keep my eye out for other All Dressed chip brands to check out differences.

In case you were worried, I'm not planning on turning this into some kind of hyper-focused food blog where I review only Quebecois potato chips, but I have been feeling the urge to cook for people recently. I always had to restrain myself from feeding REAL American food to my ESL students (restricting myself to maybe writing the words "soul food," "tex-mex," and "creole/cajun" on a notecard I gave them). I'd always ask, "have you tried some American food?" and they'd say, "Yes, pizza, spaghetti, hamburger."

But I would like to cook interesting things for people. Maybe I need to find a Canadian counterpart who wants to cook me Canadian food and we can switch off every other weekend or something. I mean, I like poutine, other people should enjoy biscuits and gravy, right?

Delicious tree juice & my birthday

I turned thirty three days ago, and received two very nice birthday cards, both of which mentioned how much the card-senders had been enjoying reading my blog. But there hasn't been an update to my blog in ages, you might say! How could they possibly continue to enjoy it if you don't update? So update I shall.

Well, a couple of things have happened in the last while. Penelope died. I turned thirty. I unpacked more stuff and worked on my resume. Ben and I registered for new drivers' licenses (they took away our ugly Virginia ones) and for Medicare (the Canadian, everyone-gets-it kind of Medicare).

On my birthday, we went to a sugar shack, or a "cabane à sucre"--I prefer the second one because it sounds a lot less like a strip club or a sorority house, and more like a place where maple sap gets turned into maple syrup. Basically you get a bunch of things that last the winter well--beans, pickled whatnots (beets, cucumbers, cauliflower, tomatoes), ham, eggs--then you pour maple syrup all over these items and eat them.

I adore maple syrup, so I was already predisposed to like this sort of thing. A couple of miles down the road from the farm I grew up on was a place that in retrospect seemed to have made its entire living off of trees--they sold cut-your-own Christmas trees in winter and made maple syrup in early spring.

Canada wins at maple syrup: about 75% of the world's maple syrup comes from Quebec. A maple leaf is on the Canadian flag, and maple syrup is delicious. On the other hand, you have American pancake syrup, which is racist and flavored with fenugreek. The internet tells me that Quebecois call it "sirop de poteau" or "pole syrup" because it's apparently what you get when you tap a telephone pole.

Anyway, a big yellow school bus marked "special" picked us up at Ben's work in the afternoon on Thursday and drove us over with all of the folks from the EA Montreal office. Ben's coworkers are all cool people, and a lot younger than his previous job--someone brought a baby and the dudes in their mid-twenties were surprised. Before it was sort of strange that we didn't have any kids, now it's kind of strange that we're married.

As usual, I hope I didn't say anything horribly offensive to a fairly multicultural group. I know a lot of folks view it as a badge of honor to not be PC about these sorts of things, but I guess I'm just the sort of person who worries more about being a jerk. It's just a large shift from being safe and comfortable at home to a place where I actually have an accent. Me, who's always sounded like a newscaster! Thrilling!

I will close this with an exciting list of Things I Could Eat a Nearly Unlimited Amount of (but not together because that would be nasty):

1. Maple Syrup
2. Deviled Eggs
3. Oreos

(Pictures thanks to Ben's coworker and amateur photographer, Gary Stewart.)

Politics, Religion, Sex

So you know how you're not really supposed to talk about politics in polite conversation?

Yeah, living in DC for a couple of years made me forget about that, too. In college most of my friends were interested in politics and activism and that sort of thing, and moving to the Washington metro region didn't exactly help me kick the habit. Most of DC's economy rests on the government, so even if you don't work directly for the gov, you're most likely working for an association or a group that lobbies or you work in a non-profit that is trying to squeeze grants or whatever.

So when I came up here, I did some looking around and some research on the Canadian government and the kinds of social issues Canadians are interested in. I'd taken a sociolinguistics class a few semesters ago with a prof who'd taught here at Macgill for a while--the same one who gave me the tip about the pretzels also gave us an overview of the kinds of identity politics that are going on in Quebec and Canada as a whole.

But nobody wants to talk about it. Canadian citizens--both anglos and francophones--either jump at talking shit in a completely unproductive way about the other side, or they get uncomfortable and change the subject. I personally am interested in what's going on with the Quebecois identity and how that's tied into the French language and Canadian politics, but nobody's talking.

I decided to stop trying the other day; Ben had his yearly "don't harass people" workshop at his job and apparently talking to someone about Quebec sovereignty is on the same NO list as sexual harassment and threatening people. So rather than harass people about politics, I'll stop. It's just frustrating when I take a "who should you vote for" quiz online and that is where I find out that Canada has a Senate that might get dissolved.

I am apparently suited to the Bloc Quebecois, even though I answered every Quebec-related question with "I don't know."

Passers-by, not passer-bys (& Stevie Wonder)

Our street sees a reasonable amount of through-traffic considering that it runs for only about 3 blocks.


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Avenue Melville runs between Rue Sainte-Catherine O and Rue Sherbrooke O (the O stands for "ouest"), which are two major east-west (est-oueste?) streets in Montreal. Several of the local universities are located along Sherbrooke
and Sainte-Catherine runs parallel to it, and has a lot of entrances into the underground city when you get downtown. When I walked to meet Ben at work the other day, I went straight down Sainte-Catherine for maybe 40 minutes and I was there.

We sit on the eastern side of Westmount Park, which means that if someone wants to cut between Sherbrooke and Sainte-Catherine, Melville is either the last street before the park or the first street after the park. This means that a lot of people use my street to cut through, and they drive down it at a million kilometers per hour despite 2 or 3 speed humps (I wish I knew the word for that in French).

So, for whatever reason, this results in a lot of running-of-red-lights and squealing-of-tires. Maybe the idea of having to wait for several blocks to cross from Sherbrooke to Sainte-Catherine is enough to test the patience of a Sainte and people just lose control. Most people who cruise through, however, obey the traffic laws. Since we're right on the corner, we can see the traffic light through our window, resulting in strange red and green reflections. Luckily we are a bit above ground-level, so occupants of cars can't see us and we can't see them when we are sitting in our living room.

What does filter up, however, is noise. Our old bedroom window faced out onto Route 50, so we got a reasonable amount of road noise in Arlington. It was mostly white noise, though, and we often used it to tell what the weather would be before we got out of bed--wet roads sound different than dry ones. Since we're right next to a school, sometimes louder school buses come by, but I don't find that to be particularly distracting.

What IS distracting is the music. People cruise by my apartment blasting their jams all the time, and the angle must be such that the sound waves go right into our windows.

What really gets to me about the music, though, is the fact that I can't recognize most of those songs. I've always been relatively skilled in playing name-that-tune, but as time has progressed I've paid less and less attention to popular music and mainstream hip-hop. It makes me feel old and out-of-touch, which I am--in just a few more years, we will buy a house that will have a lawn that I will yell at kids to stay off of, and I'm looking forward to that.

Anyway, the whole point to this long story was simply to tell you that I finally heard a car blasting a song I knew, and it was Stevie Wonder's "Cherie Amour."



See, it's kind of funny because the title is in French. And it's a song about someone never noticing you. And who the hell blasts, "Cherie Amour?"

Stevie Wonder songs I would not blast:
"That's What Friends Are For"
"I Believe"

Songs I initially put on the above list and then removed:
"I Just Called to Say I Love You""

I am embarrassed to say that I remembered this as a Stevie Wonder song:

Mystery screws

Ben and I had an odd moment a few weeks ago when we went to the Home Depot to pick up screws for our curtain hardware.

Almost every single screw in the store had a square hole in it. We looked around and found a few Philips head screws, but in very limited numbers that meant we couldn't get what we needed.

I thought, "What the heck?"

Had some revolution in screws been implemented since I'd last been in a Home Depot (probably only a few months ago)? Had I just not noticed this seismic shift in the screw world? I consider myself a relatively crafty lady; although I'm generally not building things, tools and such are at least on the periphery of my consciousness. And I mean, contractors shop at Home Depot too--could the entire construction industry have picked up and changed when I wasn't looking? It's hard to see on this page, but most of the screws appear to be the ones with the square holes.

We asked the man about the Philips head screws we wanted, and he said, "oh, well, why don't you want these square head ones?"

"Well," I said, "I've never even seen this type of screw before. We don't have a screwdriver that will work on it."

"Really?" he said, "These screws are a lot better than Philips head. You just put the screw on the screwdriver and it doesn't fall off!"

So B and I decided to give these screws a try, since our options beyond them were extremely limited, and because it gave me an excuse to buy a pink screwdriver, which is fly.

The man was right--you put the screw on the screwdriver and it doesn't fall off, meaning that you don't need to use two hands (one to hold the screwdriver and one to hold the screw). I have the sneaking suspicion that these screws might be better than what I'm used to, although I don't know how they stand up against stripping and that sort of thing.

It turns out that these are called "Robertson" screws, and they're mainly used in Canada. Turns out this guy Robertson invented a screw so awesome that his competitors did some underhanded stuff that almost made him lose his patent. When Henry Ford came along and wanted to license the screws to use on his Ford assembly line, the suspicious Robertson declined and Ford went with Philips head screws instead.

I suppose he's lucky that Thomas Edison didn't find out and steal his idea.

So apparently Canada has been holding out on a better screw head.

The city I live in

I haven't ever really lived in a new city since my family moved to Richmond when I was fifteen, and then I wasn't really able to take advantage of the full depth of the city as I was often too young for things or later, didn't have a car.

DC was not entirely new--while I only found out that Arlington was more than a cemetery when I met a friend from there my freshman year of college, my grandparents had always lived in Silver Spring (Exit 33B off of the Beltway until they changed the way the exit was set up). Visits to DC with my parents when I was young mainly impressed upon me the importance of telling the driver what lane to be in to avoid doing something crazy like getting off on the 270 spur. I have nice memories of making a day at the museums with my mother, having lunch at some of the Smithsonian cafeterias, and gawking at the mangy mammoth in the Natural History Museum.

DC has certain things that it believes about itself. Maryland and Virginia drivers both believe that the other state has the worst drivers in the country. On the Metro, you stand right and walk left, and get out of the way of people getting off the train and THEN get on; if you do not do this you are an immoral person.

So as the arrogant interloper, I had to laugh when I got here and was informed of a few things:

1) It gets really hot here during the summer. (Some times it gets up to 79F!!)
2) Traffic is REALLY bad. (Heh)

Some additional things I noticed, which mostly have to do with driving:

1) Everyone LOVES to honk at each other here. You hesitate at the line, you'll get honked. You turn too slow, you get honked. You don't run a stale yellow, you get honked.

My favorite was the time a dude came blazing around our corner and considerately honked to tell pedestrians NOT to cross because he sure as heck wasn't going to stop.

2) I have seen so many people just pop their car into reverse and cruise back an entire block or two to take a missed turn or nab a parking space. It is disconcerting when cars whiz by in the wrong direction. When I am walking it makes me wonder if it is me who is doing something wrong that has somehow upset the fabric of the universe for a second.

3) Nobody waits for train occupants to get off a Metro train before trying to get on. This, to me, amounts to the total breakdown of society.

So all in all, I don't think the driving here is nearly as bad as it was in DC, but it's a strange blend of bad-in-a-different-way that I wasn't expecting. I suppose these aren't things that people think to warn you of if they're normal habits...I wonder what tips I'd give people about DC now that I'm gone from there and have some other-city perspective.

Still living in another country

KFC is called PFK.