lately

These beautiful flowering trees are up all over the city right now and I love them so much! What are they called?

I bought some fun flavoured salts - herb garden, chili peppercorn, & garlic chili - but I have no idea what to do with them. A couple of times I made chocolate peanut butter cups and topped them with the chili pepper for some heat and that was good. But what else? And don't say popcorn because nothing beats plain old sea salt.

More about salt: one of my students gave me this salt scrub in coconut and jasmine as a year-end gift and it smells amazing! (Though I've been reading that scrubs are not the healthiest habit for our skin...) Plus it's all natural, fair trade, and locally sourced (they bought it while in Thailand) - he must know I'm a bit of a hippie. (The rye flour is out, by the way. Listened to my hair and it said no. not my thing. Will be trying out a bentonite clay mix (with some acv for pH balancing).)

Because it's on topic and I can't resist: Scrubs like you've never heard it.

Moving on.

We're watching Fargo. It's so good, it's got us talking in hecks and saying things are sooper.

Watch this trailer from Richard Linklater - such a fantastic idea that looks brilliantly executed.

This is my favourite granola to make but I almost always almost burn the top layer to a crisp and we eat it anyway.

Last week I shared about the misfortune of our plants, due in part to the fact that I'm not particularly green-thumbed. (Seriously, how do you kill a plant that thrives on air?!) This after one old bud ( ha ha.) up and died early in June. Sadly, we also have an old bamboo that's on the fence about life and just got a new hydroponic plant that's also not shining. So I got some cacti because there's no way I'm going to kill those by underwatering or otherwise neglecting. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with plants. Or so bad at them.

Speaking of plants... I'm from a small town in Ontario, Canada, and never thought anything of our provincial logo, the trillium. Until now. Perspective!

Jeff has started a ginger bug for us so soon we'll have our own ginger ale! That's exciting!