The Grand Tour

The Tour De France is over and FINALLY Cadel Evans has won. I have bet on him many times in the past and this year I've finally been rewarded. This year is supposedly the cleanest year in tour history. Read about it here. I almost cried watching him standing on the podium listening to the Australian national anthem. I think it was a good thing that he didn't win yellow until the last day as that jersey seemed to weight him down in the past rather than give him wings. I'm so happy for him.

Yesterday I did a tag-team 8 hour mountain bike race in temperatures over 30 degrees and humidity over 40%. Many people were pulled from the race with heat stroke. After 5 laps each, my partner and I had to bow out - her with stomach issues and me with leg cramps. It was still a fun day of riding my bike!

Wow. Yesterday was the day of trends. Started the day with 4 c-sections. 2 planned and 2 people coming in with rupture of membranes before booked repeat sections. Then there were a couple of vaginal deliveries and then it started... the big babies came. In total I did 14 deliveries yesterday and 2 were over 10 pounds, another 3 over 9 and an 8'15. Shoulders were tight on one, everything was tight on the other 10 pounder. One woman was told she was having a small baby and her previous baby was only 7'5. This was a bit of a shock and she did not have an epidural... What a tough lady! She was a champ.

It was an exhausting day but I really felt like I enhanced some people's birthing experience and all but 1 baby was healthy (there was one expected fetal demise with genetic defects). And there were beautiful twins that didn't have to go to nicu. all in all a good day on L and D but I'm exhausted.

Cooking day

So, today I decided to make the ultimate veggie burger from Fresh Restaurant in Toronto. Recipe found here.

This is one of those recipes that I hate because you need to go to the store and buy a bunch of stuff you may never use again in another recipe. And then you have to go to another store because your grocery store doesn't stock millet. Thankfully my grocery store (Fresh co. formerly known as Price Chopper) has a very large ethnic section so did have tamarind paste.

If I was making it again I would:
1) put the tamarind in when I whiz the carrots, tofu etc. in the food processor
2) make it as a loaf - it tastes and has the texture of an awesome meatloaf more than a burger
3) add an egg white. I'm not a vegan and I think it would bind it a lot better
4) adjust the quantities - I doubled the recipe and ended up with 16 burgers

What I did:
cooked 3 today for dinner and lunch tomorrow and froze the rest on baking sheets in the freezer. I then cooked one from frozen for Ben's lunch tomorrow and it stayed together better when cooking from frozen.

You know, all day I made difficult decisions, deal with many personalities, bring life into the world but then I come home to my most difficult conundrum: what to make for dinner. Because I'm a pesco-vegetarian the options although numerous are often a bit higher maintenance. I make a lot of fish, but this drives the husband crazy because although he enjoys fish, he hates the smell it makes in the apartment (even with the extractor fan on). I often get all excited about making recipes and then realize that most of the ingredients are not in my cupboards and in order to make said recipe for two, I'm left with huge left over packages of many random ingredients.

So, I'm still left with the question, what to make for dinner...

directionless

Is anyone else in the world utterly clueless when it comes to a sense of direction? I have managed to get lost twice in the last week, once mountain biking and once driving. Well, I guess 3 times because I got lost on my way to mountain biking too.

I just have no sense of which was is north/south/east/west and my best way of finding where i'm going is to go the wrong way and then try to find my way out of it. I can read a map, but starting off always needs a sense of which direction the map directions correspond to.

Was I born without some internal compass?

Every time I unpack a box I look around and think "how can we have more stuff than this" and yet, there are more boxes. I ahve thrown out more stuff in the last week than I knew I had. I have learned how many random sports we've tried and then abandoned but kept the equipment - baseball, volleyball, climbing, badminton (just the husband), golf... not to mention the sports we still do. We have 6 bikes (soon to be seven), two snowboards, full camping gear, yoga mats, myofascial release logs and two sets of cross country skis. We have a first world problem: too much stuff. I hereby declare a moratorium on gift giving that makes more stuff. We have more pillows than two people can ever consume in a lifetime and have been pawning them off on people to take to their cottages. Not to mention the doubles of items from our separate apartments - irons, microwaves, dining tables. I'm going insane.

an addition for Dr. J: this is a myofascial release "roller" which I think looks like a log especially because mine has a kind of bark pattern on it